The majority of time since the last update was taken by abstracting away calling convention code to prepare for System V ABI used by Linux and Mac. With that done, adding Linux JIT setup was a breeze. There is still lots to be done for proper System V ABI compatibility as well as dlopen integration, but it is pretty exciting to have a custom backend that works across multiple platforms.
Besides that there were also many smaller changes:
Besides that there were also many smaller changes:
- Fixed encoding of 8-bit SI, DI, BP, SP operands
- Auto-generation of Mass bindings for compiler C structs
- Fixed overload resolution for compile-time ...
The majority of the development up until about a month ago was about figuring out the basic features of the compiler. As you start to combine them together new and unexpected cases need to be solved. Besides the common language issues such as signed / unsigned integer handling Mass has a lot of its own problems to solve. The most tricky one is handling the boundary between compile-time execution and runtime code. So far there is no production language with the same power as what I aim for so there is no real way to know what is the correct ...
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When I started the work on the Mass language I wanted to challenge some of the established practices of writing compilers with one of them being the presence of abstract syntax tree (AST) as intermediary representation for the program. This month I have admitted defeat and introduced something like an AST. In this post, I want to share some of the details and the reasoning for the switch.
There are two main ways the compilers are written today, both involving an AST. The first, more traditional approach is to have a pipeline with at least the following steps:
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There are two main ways the compilers are written today, both involving an AST. The first, more traditional approach is to have a pipeline with at least the following steps:
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As I'm closing on 1 year of working on Mass I was quite curious to see if my approach to compile-time execution via JIT makes sense and how it compares with other languages that are capable of compile time execution, namely C++ and Zig. I do not have access to Jai, so can not measure that.
For now I just did two test program. The first one runs a counter 1 000 000 times at compile time and stores a result into a compile-time constant. The counter is then printed at runtime to verify the output value.
The goal of ... Read More →
For now I just did two test program. The first one runs a counter 1 000 000 times at compile time and stores a result into a compile-time constant. The counter is then printed at runtime to verify the output value.
The goal of ... Read More →
I have started developing the mass compiler in April 2020 with the majority of early work captured in a series of YouTube videos. Due to the limitation of doing the work on video the progress in the first half-year or so was quite slow. Still, by September 2020 the language got sufficiently powerful to run FizzBuzz both in JIT mode and by compiling it to a Windows executable.
Four months later FizzBuzz remains the most complex program in the test suit, however, that does not mean there was no progress. My main focus throughout this time has been mainly ... Read More →
Four months later FizzBuzz remains the most complex program in the test suit, however, that does not mean there was no progress. My main focus throughout this time has been mainly ... Read More →