This is a small (partly educational for myself, partly a potential example for
anyone else picking up these tools) project derived from the Chumsky parser
combinator crate's tutorial.
Rather than the tutorial's in-Rust interpreter-style implementation, I've
modified the code to take the AST from the parser and transfer it to an LLVM
backend using Inkwell (which provides a
Rust wrapper around LLVM's API).
To get an executable:
foo_llvm test.foo
You can also set the -p flag to llvm-ir, assembly, bitcode, or object
to get other types of output. llvm-ir, by default, is written to stderr
unless an output file is specified.
Producing an executable requires a C compiler or linker: the options the
program recognizes are clang, gcc, ld, lld (the LLVM linker), or
link (the MSVC linker) -- if none are specified, it will try each.
Note: Some linkers (specifically the MSVC linker) are currently untested.
To build this project from source, you must have llvm-config and version 18
of LLVM installed. Ideally, llvm-sys's build script should automatically be
able to locate your LLVM installation.
The libffi crate is also listed as a dependency. By default, this builds the
libffi library for interfacing with C by itself in order to include it. Per the
crate's documentation, if you have libffi installed and would prefer it use that
rather than building a new copy, you can change Cargo.toml to specify the
system feature:
[dependencies]
...
libffi = { version = "3.2.0", features = ["system"] }
Aside from issues you may (but hopefuly don't) have with linking LLVM or libffi,
the project should run with a simple cargo run -- test.foo without any other
trouble. I wrote it using Rust 1.82.0.