ccmic

Overview

This project is a work-in-progress implementation of a C compiler (that supports a subset of the C programming language) written in C++. The general design of the compiler is based on the book Writing a C Compiler by Nora Sandler. The implementation is tested against the book's companion test suite (by Nora Sandler). On top of that, a GoogleTest-based test suite is on the way to be implemented to further validate the compiler's intermediate phases and functionalities.

The compiler is capable of processing C programs and generating corresponding assembly code, which includes the end-to-end transformation of high-level C source code into low-level assembly instructions suitable for x86-64 architecture. Key compiler phases, including lexical analysis (lexing), syntactic analysis (parsing), semantic analysis, intermediate representation (IR) generation, and (x86-64) assembly code generation and emission, are implemented. The Visitor design pattern is leveraged to traverse and manipulate the abstract syntax tree (AST) within the compiler.

Features

Expressions

• Unary operations: Supports for unary operators (-, ~, !).
• Binary operations: Handles arithmetic, bitwise, assignment operators, and logical and relational operators (+, -, *, /, %, &, |, =, &&, ||, <, >, <=, >=, ==, !=).

Statements

• Local variables: Supports declarations and usage of variables within functions and scopes.
• If-statements and conditional expressions: Supports control flow using if, else, and conditional (ternary) expressions (? :).
• Compound statements: Allows nesting multiple blocks using {}.
• Loops: Supports for, while, and do-while loops (with break and continue statements).

Functions

• Function definitions: Allows defining functions with parameters and a return type.
• Function calls: Supports calling user-defined and standard library functions.

File Scope and Storage Classes

• File-scope variable declarations: Handles global variables and their initialization.
• Storage-class specifiers: Supports static and extern specifiers for controlling variable visibility and linkage.

Building the Compiler

To build the compiler, run the following command in the root directory of the repository:

# arch -x86_64 zsh # Run this command if one is running macOS on ARM and is using zsh.
make

Usage

To compile a C source file, use the following command in the root directory of the repository:

bin/main [--lex] [--parse] [--validate] [--tacky] [--codegen] [-S] [-s] [-c] [-o] [--fold-constants] <sourceFile>