TCTCTC: The C Tiger Compiler That Compiles

Introduction

Follow the instruction of Modern Compiler implementation in C, finish the the program part of chapter 12 (as a course lab). Unlike many tiger compilers you can found on github, TCTCTC(hereafter referred as TCTC) implements back-end and compiles.

This project includes:

• Lexical Analysis (ch 2)
• Parsing (ch 3)
• Abstract Syntax (ch 4)
• Type Checking (ch 5)
• Support for x86 frame (ch 6)
• Escape Analysis (ch 6)
• Into a lower IR (ch 7)
• Canoical trees and make basic blocks. (Code provided by the author) (ch 8)
• Instruction selection in IA32. (ch 9)
• Flowgraph and Liveness (ch 10)
• Coloring, including spilling and coalescing. (ch 11)

This work can be improved by:

• Make the compiler support macOS & clang linker (currently TCTC can compile a few programs like queens.tig on macOS...orz) or other platforms and frames.

• Improve IR, use some fancier translation(like CJUMP in while) described in chapter 7.

• TCTC assumes a fixed length for frame, adjust to scan the frame and generate correctly frame size.

• Better heuristic function in choosing spilled nodes.

• All the advanced topics(CG, OOP, FP, etc.)...

• Write scipts for compile and link into binary.

Maybe there are bugs in:

• Spilling. When we enable callee-save registers to be moved into temp first and spill them later if necessary, there's infinite spilling for some testcase. Modify x86fram.c to see it...

Usage

TCTC should compiles in linux. (at least all the testcases in linux)

1. Compile TCTC. You must have lex and bison(or yacc) installed.

make

2. Use TCTC to compile a tiger program. There are some examples in testcase/

./a.out <program>

Assembly .s will be generated.

3. Link

For gcc,

gcc -Wl,--wrap,getchar -m32 <assembly> runtime.c -o <binary>

For clang:

(Can't find clang equivalence for --wrap, so it doesn't work when tiger source calls getchar(). If a workaround is found, please issue.)

4. Run

./<binary>