When I said I’d never written a compiler, that’s actually a lie: I did some work on the Ceylon compiler a few years back. It wasn’t a very enriching experience but at least I know what ASTs and visitors are.
Anyway, the C-like syntax I talked about Friday might have been a little optimistic. I wanted the source to not be full of stack-shuffling but that’s not going to happen. Partly because I’d been assuming that the problem of compiling to a stack-based instruction set was solved: I was thinking of Java, but of course Java has local variables so it’s not exactly a stack-based instruction set, it’s stack and 65,536 registers–kind of the opposite problem! I didn’t find much online about compiling to stack-based instruction sets other than “it’s hard”.
I could probably manage something, but given that the total output of the compiler for glibc will likely be a hundred or so bytes of instructions, it doesn’t make sense to spend a huge amount of time on it.
The Infinity function compiler is therefore going to be something of a helpful assembler.
