nashiora/laye-cs

Laye

Laye is a modern general purpose programming language aiming to provide a C-like experience with additional low- and zero-cost language features.

Laye as a C Compiler

Since Laye is designed to interface easily with C, you can use Laye as a C compiler. The layec compiler has two C compilation modes for different purposes. The compiler natively accepts C source files (just how it would .ly Laye source files) and compiles them into the same internal IR that Laye uses. Using this feature means you can compile C code to the same targets that Laye supports by default. For convenience, the layec cc command is provided which will invoke other installed compilers to compile C directly as those compilers would. For example, if clang is installed and visible to the layec executable then clang will be the compiler used. You can control this behavior and pass additional arguments with various flags.

# Use the Laye toolchain to compile a C source file
layec hello.c

# Use the first detected C compiler to compile a C source file
layec cc hello.c

(As this feature is built out, more example will be provided to illustrate the various uses.)

Self-hosted Development

As different benchmarks are reached in the self-hosting of the language, they will be archived in subfolders of the main repository (like self-0) until enough stability is attained that the bootstrap folder can contain some form of portable code (like C or assembly) to become the defacto bootstrap source. During the time that these self-hosting stages are present, the process to build the current version of the compiler will be to build the bootstrap compiler and then each self-hosting compiler in sequence until the final version can compile itself and is used for further development. Shell scripts will be maintained to automate that process.

Acknowledgements

• Crafting Interpreters While not a direct influence in Laye's development, it was a great resources many years ago when I was learning how programming languages were implemented.

• tsoding (Twitch, YouTube) His Porth series revitalized my drive to work on Laye and continues to be very engaging.