Compilers are perceived to be magical artifacts, carefully crafted
by the wizards, and unfathomable by the mere mortals.
This is from a great paper by Abdulaziz Ghuloum on how compilers are made. It, along with a timely email from Julian Rohrhuber inspired me to have a go at making a tiny one for compiling scheme to betablocker – the idea is that you only need a handful of scheme primitives before you are able to bootstrap all the other code together. Betablocker is no way powerful enough to go too far with this, but I think there may be some good uses for compiling bits of fluxus scheme code on Raspberry Pi and Android, maybe not to native binary but mixing an interpreter with a fast intermediate language for graphics processing would make it possible to compile object deformation inner loops i.e. (pdata-map!) and friends for per-vertex operations, but have it transparently the same language to the user/livecoder.
I’ve only dealt with fixnums, booleans, null lists and a handful of simple core procedures, but compiling something stupid like this:
(and (zero? (- (+ 12 4) (+ 43 (add1 34)))) (boolean? #f))
Results in this:
Via the slightly more conventional looking:
pshl 24 pshl 8 add pshl 86 pshl 68 pshl 2 add add sub pshl 0 equ jmpz label-1 pshl 4 jmp label-2 label-1: pshl 0 label-2: pshl 0 pshl 3 and pshl 3 equ jmpz label-3 pshl 4 jmp label-4 label-3: pshl 0 label-4: and jmpz label-5 pshl 4 jmp label-6 label-5: pshl 0 label-6:
2 thoughts on “An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction”