xixixao/malice

Down-to-assembly compiler written in MetaCoffee

This assignment is no longer used at Imperial, so I decided to publish our solution. It's a compiler for made up language called MAlice (see langspec/malice_milestone2_spec.md), which compiles given plaintext source code into x86 assembly. I wish we were allowed to compile down to LLVM, but this would prevent us to handroll some of the assembly optimizations (think register allocation).

This is an example of how MetaCoffee and/or CoffeeScript can be used to write a full-blown down-to-assembly compiler.

MAlice Milestone 2

Overview

Main file is src/main.coffee, parser (includes lexing) is defined in src/parser.metacoffee, semantic analyser is defined in src/semantics.metacoffee.

We are using the top-down parser generator tool called MetaCoffee (https://github.com/xixixao/meta-coffee/ - I am still working on full documentation) similar to PEG.js (https://github.com/dmajda/pegjs) for both parsing of the input MAlice code and traversing the AST.

File Structure

Makefile
  - Invoke build by running `make`
compile
  - Launch script, executes src/main.js with Node.js
src/
  main.coffee
    - Main entry point of the compiler / CLI
  parser.metacoffee
    - Grammar definitions and AST generation
  semantics.metacoffee
    - Semantic analysis / error checking
  loadMetaCoffee.coffee
    - Initializes parser and semantics with MetaCoffee base
  colorConsole.coffee
    - Removes colors from console output if redirected
  errorprinter.coffee
    - Pretty printer for compile-time errors
lib/
node_modules/
bin/
  - stores JavaScript files built by make