Compiler

Architecture and documentation

Please check out the wiki for more documentation and lessons learned!

The main purpose of this project is to learn more about compiler. Therefore, I try my best to create a good knowledge base in the wiki that not only documents the code but also the lessons I’ve learned in the process. I hope this project could be helpful for others in the future, especially those who want to use LLVM C API but struggle with the lack of documentation from the main website.

Overview

Final Project for Compiler Design class in Spring 2018. The project is to build a simple recursive decent with one lookahead (LL(1)) compiler from scratch (without using external compiler frontend tools such as flex or bison). The file projectDescription.pdf gives more details about the project.

This compiler compiles a made-up language. The file projectLanguageDescription.pdf in the root folder specifies the grammar and semantics of the language. Some example code in this language can be found in code_gen/tests folder.

There are five development phases:

• Scanner: Implemented in the scanner folder
• Parser: the parser folder.
• Type Checking: the symbol_table, semantics and type_checking folders.
• Code Generation: the code_gen folder (current development).
• Runtime: To be implemented. However, the compiler can still with lli tool.

Future goals: After this project, I’m hoping to learn more about compiler optimization.