Development Guide

🛠 Compiling a C Program

This compiler will perform the following steps:

• C AST generation
• Semantic analysis
• 3 address code (Tacky) conversion
• ASM generation
• Pseudoregister replacement
• Instruction fix up
• Assembly code text dump

To compile a source file into assembly using the custom compiler, follow these steps:

1. Build and Run the Compiler

First, ensure the binary is built, create the output directory, and run the compilation:

# Build the compiler target
bazel build //src/compiler:compiler

# Ensure the output directory exists
mkdir -p asm_output

# Compile the source to assembly
./bazel-bin/src/compiler \
    $PWD/examples/complex_expression.c \
    $PWD/asm_output/complex_expression.S

2. Assemble and Link:

   cd asm_output
   gcc -o complex_expression complex_expression.S
   ./complex_expression

3. AST Visualization: The compiler will automatically dump Graphviz plots for all stages of the AST into the /asm_output directory.

4. Stress testing:

   For stress testing of expression evaluation:

   bazel test \
       --test_arg=--seed=400 \
       --test_arg=--iterations=5000 \
       --test_arg=--max_height=40 \
       //test/fuzzing:expression_fuzzing_test

5. Features implemented so far:

• Chapter 1: A Minimal Compiler
• Chapter 2: Unary Operators
• Chapter 3: Binary Operators
• Chapter 4: Logical and Relational Operators
• Chapter 5: Local Variables
• Chapter 6: if Statements and Conditional Expressions
• Chapter 7: Compound Statements
• Chapter 8: Loops
• Chapter 9: Functions
• Chapter 10: File Scope Variable Declarations and Storage-Class Specifiers
• Chapter 11: Long Integers
• Chapter 12: Unsigned Integers
• Chapter 13: Floating-Point Numbers
• Chapter 14: Pointers
• Chapter 15: Arrays and Pointer Arithmetic
• Chapter 16: Characters and Strings
• Chapter 17: Supporting Dynamic Memory Allocation
• Chapter 18: Structures
• Chapter 19: Optimizing TACKY Programs
• Chapter 20: Register Allocation