Carbon Intermediate Representation

The carbon intermediate representation or carbon for short is a architecture independent optimizer and code generator designed to easily connect the front end of a compiler to multiple backend architectures.

Carbon can either be used as an standalone compiler via it's own assembly-like language or linked into your compiler and accessed via its C API.

Build

Before you build carbon, make sure you have

C++ 11 compiler
CMake >= 3.0
Bash compatible shell (though this is only to automate build processes etc)

And to run tests you will also need python 3

To build the carbon-ir compiler, in the main directory run ./build.sh.

To build the libcarbon-ir.a static library, in the main directory run ./buildlib.sh

Running the tests

To run carbon's tests you will first need to build carbon-ir. Once you have the compiler you can just run ./test.sh to run all tests at once and run ./test.sh testX to run a specific test (change X to the number of the test you want to run).

The C API testing framework is still being worked on so for now you can go into tests/capi/ and run the makefile to generate the test executables.

Examples of the language

The carbon-ir language is a very simple and staticly typed.

This function will add 1 and 5 together and return its result

function i32 main() <global:true>
{
    %0 = i32 1
    %1 = i32 5
    %2 = add i32 %0 %1
    return i32 %2
}

The C equivalent would then be:

int main()
{
    return 1 + 5;
}

However it could also very well be:

int main()
{
    int x = 1;
    int y = 5;
    return x + y;
}

As you can see when you compile C or any other language to carbon-ir you don't have to worry about allocating variables and carbon will handle all register allocation and spills for you.

For all the other operations and info check the operations.md in the docs folder

Usage of the compiler

The most basic usage of carbon would be:

carbon-ir ./file-to-compile.ir

This will just generate a binary for the file specified called a.out in the default architecture (x86). However to change that name you can utilise the -o flag

carbon-ir ./file-to-compile -o the-name

If you would like to generate for a different machine type use the -m flag

carbon-ir ./file-to-compile -o the-name -m aarch64

Currently the architectures you can compile for are: x86, z80, aarch64 (armv8) and JVM but please check the machines.md file in the docs folder for more information on that.

For more flags check the help flag

carbon-ir --help

Usage of the C API

Here follows a simple example of the carbon C API.

#include <api/carbon.h>
int main()
{
    struct carbon carb = init_carbon("test", "x86");
    struct cfunc func = c_create_func(carb, "main", CTYPE_I32), 0, 0);

    c_add_func_attribute(func, "global:true");

    c_push_op(func, INTLIT, 1, -1, c_reg(func, 0, CTYPE_I32), CTYPE_I32);
    c_push_op(func, RETURN, c_reg(func, 0, CTYPE_I32), -1, -1, CTYPE_I32);

    /* Generate all the operations and build the executable */
    c_gen_func(func);
    c_destroy_func(func);
    c_writeassembly(carb, "test.s");
    end_carbon(carb);
}