jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler
The Super Tiny Compiler
This project is an educational compiler implementation and architecture demo. It serves as a small-scale C-style language compiler designed to demonstrate the fundamental stages of transforming source code into executable machine instructions.
The codebase functions as a tool for compiler architecture education and design prototyping. It illustrates the process of building an educational language implementation to help users understand the mechanics of parsing and code generation.
The implementation covers the primary stages of a compiler pipeline, including regular expression tokenization, recursive descent parsing, and abstract syntax tree representation. It utilizes a linear pipeline architecture to perform single-pass compilation and direct-to-assembly generation.
Features
- Architecture Demonstrations - Provides a simplified implementation to demonstrate the core structural stages of a compiler pipeline.
- Assembly Generators - Provides direct translation from a parsed syntax tree into machine-readable assembly instructions.
- Educational Compilers - Serves as a small-scale project designed to teach the fundamental construction of a compiler.
- Recursive Descent Parsers - Implements a recursive descent parser to convert token streams into a hierarchical tree structure.
- Compiler Architecture Demos - Provides a minimal codebase illustrating the integrated workflow of lexing, parsing, and code generation.
- Compiler Reference Implementations - Provides a studyable reference implementation of a compiler to demonstrate source-to-executable transformation.
- Educational Implementations - Implements a small-scale programming language to demonstrate the mechanics of parsing and code generation.
- Lexical Tokenizers - Uses regular expression pattern matching to perform lexical analysis and tokenize raw input strings.
- C Source Translators - Translates a basic C-style language into machine-specific assembly instructions.
- Compiler Design - Implements basic concepts of lexical analysis and syntax translation for design prototyping purposes.
- Internal Tree Representations - Implements internal tree representations to model the logical structure of the program during the compilation process.
- Single-Pass Generators - Emits machine instructions directly during the parsing phase in a single traversal of the source.
- Pipeline Architectures - Organizes the compilation process into a sequential pipeline from lexing to code generation.
- Programming Languages - A tiny compiler implementation for learning core concepts.
