As in, why not just use, say, GCC? While other, better, more extensible compilers exist, I felt it would be good exercise to write a language compiler from the ground up. I'm reading through the Dragon Book anyways; may as well prove I'm learning.
Because there are no open-source implementations. To quote Peter Maurer:
If you really want a Jovial compiler you can get one. It might be expensive and you might have to go through a lot of rigamarole to get it, but a current Jovial compiler for modern PCs does indeed exist. However, the cost of such a compiler is beyond the resources of this little archive. It's probably also beyond the resources of the average programmer. So unless you've got a government contract, getting a Jovial compiler is probably not in your future.
Languages not preserved in implementation are doomed to be lost. Plus, when deciding on a language to write a compiler for, an ancient language designed for tiny archaic systems seemed like the best choice.
Familiarity. And availability of tools. Self-hosting would also be nice, but that would require a pre-existing compiler. Failing this, C is an ALGOL-style language, which would make porting it to JOVIAL a (hopefully) easy-ish task.
This project requires a C11 compiler to compile. Its build system is done with make. Developed on a Windows 10 platform, with GCC
- The entirety of code generation
- Outputting a stack-based IR from parsing
- Outputting a register/memory based TAC from that
- Outputting an actual machine code representation from that
- The majority of parsing
- Compools
DEFINEs & co.- Declarations
- Subroutines
- Non-empty statements
- Make names case insensitive
- Correct lexing of a few symbols
!(*,*)
- Input/Output
- All optimization ever
I can't verify correctness without correct source code! Please, if anybody has MIT-licensed, or Public Domain JOVIAL source that they know compiles, or shouldn't but does with this tool anyways, open an issue and I'll include and write against the software.
This includes government products (at least in the US), so if anyone is familiar with the FOIA request process, I would be grateful for assistance.
Or, if you find an issue but do not/can not share your JOVIAL source, a clear
issue would be appreciated. There is a README in the ex folder, that would
serve reasonably well as an issue template for now.