tinyc - A Small C Compiler

tinyc is a small C compiler written in Rust. The goal of this project is to build a complete compiler toolchain, starting from lexical analysis and parsing, and eventually incorporating advanced optimizations and code generation using LLVM and potentially MLIR.

Project Structure

The project is organized into the following main components:

• src/lexer: Handles the lexical analysis phase, breaking down source code into tokens.
• src/parser: Implements the parsing phase, constructing an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) from the tokens.
• src/codegen: (Future) Will contain the code generation logic.

Current Status

Currently, the project includes a functional lexer and parser capable of processing a subset of the C language.

Future Plans

The roadmap for tinyc includes:

• LLVM Code Generation: Generating LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR) from the AST.
• LLVM Passes: Utilizing LLVM's optimization passes to improve the generated code.
• LLVM Execution Engine: Integrating an LLVM execution engine for Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation and execution.
• Ahead-of-Time (AOT) Compilation: Implementing functionality to compile tinyc programs into standalone executables.
• MLIR Integration: Exploring the use of MLIR (Multi-Level IR) for advanced compiler optimizations, especially for domain-specific or hardware-specific optimizations.

Building and Running

To build the tinyc compiler:

cargo build

To run the compiler (e.g., with a test file):

cargo run -- <input_file.tinyc>

To run the tests:

cargo test