The test7.cell includes multiple aspects of the language.

1. Structure string including field sub: to check type generation.
2. Global variable str with default value - string: to check string assignment to structures.
3. Method using pointer to type.
4. Method using structure by value and returning by value.
5. Simple expression for variable i.
6. Local variable test with assigned string.
7. Complex expression with member/call chain for variable ret.
8. And returning member chain.

Documentation

I had an idea to formalize documentation that errors can be tracked. Each section will have simple name (cmds, tsys, etc.), named sections and numbered rules.

For example: decls/var/2: If value is not provided then compilator will assign default value of that type.

Strings

Speaking of string assigment to structures, I’m assuming that a string has two properties:

• data: pointer to null-terminated string;
• len: the factual length of string.

These two properties are then applied to structures using metadata onto fields. The null-termination will be useful for C interpolation but it won’t be included in length.

Pointers

I found out that there is some redundant structures. For example - pointer structure cell_ptrnode. By definition pointer is:

<pointer> ::= '*' <type>

You’d say “pointer of ". So why I do I need the `of` part to be a list? GONE!

Arguments

When parsing various arguments such as local stack variables, function arguments etc. there was very many flags for generation. I just push all of then into one ARG_* in cell/declarations.h file. All them anyway uses structure cell_vardecl and are used similary.

Functions

Very interesting aspect about functions is that in C structures bigger than word length (64 bits, sometimes 128 bits) are usually passed by pointer to functions. But If I pass them as pointer there will problems when function changes anything. Here the LLVM IR has useful attribute byval which creates buffer for passed structure. It may copy some memory when generating machine code but it won’t mess the data.

Also since return values can be structures too I implemented logic to move return value to argument list with a flag FUNC_VOID. Also rewritten some function flags. I’ll assume that last parameter will always be moved return value.

Expressions

Expressions are hard to parse and generate. Most of the time I was just tweaking parsing and generation functions to get the result I want.

If we’re speaking about operations, interesting thing is binary one. The problem with them is multiple parts:

var <variable> <variable type> = <left expression> <op> <right expression>

If we thing naivly then here is three parts, but actually it’s four:

• left expression with values and type;
• right expressoin with value and type;
• target variable with value and type;
• AND(!) product of variable’s value with value and type.

This really complicates things but it will be fun!

Speaking of member/call/index chains they are very challenging. I been writing order of instructions multiple times but somewhat algorythm didn’t work as I wanted. I’d suggest to checkout test7.cell to understand that thing doesn’t look as easy:

test.ext().len      | test.ext().len()

ext(test).len       | len(ext(test))

Try to draw graph of types and temporaries. That will be fun!

Imports

For now I put that there are no standard library. But I haven’t decided! I changed the code that all imports (mostly builtin) are optional but I also want to put standard library in version of cell compiler written in cell.

C

I wanted to use Linux’s list.h header for lists but there wasn’t a logic I needed: last entry etc. So I wrote mine list.h. I’ll need to rename prefixes of functions!

Compiler

I know that there are many aspects of code that have to refactored. The generation part have to just generate output without need for checks but since that affects progress I will do that later.

For now a good thing is to add in parsing stage everything to unresolved lists so middle-end can faster go through. The variadic functions here are very useful!

Also I have rewritten buffer handling everywhere using safe_* macros so buffer overflows are more easier to detect. The defaults in cell/compiler.h have changed.

Most interesting part is actually intermediate values struct llvm_intervalue which includes informaton about current operation: cell type, LLVM type and LLVM temporary value. This idea came when I needed many components for instruction but I had to generate each type. Now I just pass intermediate value with all types.

In structures from front-end and middle-end the intermediate values will be just in void *data field.

Debugging

Note. It’s annoying to count enumerator’s number.

Next plans

• write binary tree implementation for symbol table to eliminate name collitions;

Ideas

• Compiler have to be standard library independent.
• Tuples?