For your homework exercises, you will be expected to implement various
compiler passes. It will ultimately be up to you how exactly to do
this, but for the first assignment you are given code templates in
compiler.rkt to fill out.
Before each assignment (and when told to by the instructor), you may need to update this code by pulling updates from GitHub by running this command from inside the folder:
git pull
As you fill out the functions in compiler.rkt, tests are run with the
run-tests.rkt module. You can run these tests either from the command
line with:
racket run-tests.rkt
Or by opening and running run-tests.rkt in DrRacket.
Before running the compiler tests, you need to compile
runtime.c (see below).
Utility code, test suites, etc. for the compiler course.
This code will be described in the Appendix of the book.
The runtime.c file needs to be compiled and linked with the assembly
code that your compiler produces. To compile runtime.c, do the
following
gcc -c -g -std=c99 runtime.c
This will produce a file named runtime.o. The -g flag is to tell the
compiler to produce debug information that you may need to use
the gdb (or lldb) debugger.
On a Mac with an M1 (ARM) processor, use the -arch x86_64 flag to
compile the runtime:
gcc -c -g -std=c99 -arch x86_64 runtime.c
Next, suppose your compiler has translated the Racket program in file
foo.rkt into the x86 assembly program in file foo.s (The .s filename
extension is the standard one for assembly programs.) To produce
an executable program, you can then do
gcc -g runtime.o foo.s
which will produce the executable program named a.out.
There is an example "compiler" in the file compiler.rkt. That
file defines two passes that translate R_0 programs to R_0 programs
and tests them using the interp-tests function from utilities.rkt. It
tests the passes on the three example programs in the tests
subdirectory. You may find it amusing (I did!) to insert bugs in the
compiler and see the errors reported. Note that interp-tests does not
test the final output assembly code; you need to use compiler-tests
for that purpose. The usage of compiler-tests is quite similar to
interp-tests. Example uses of these testing procedures appear in
run-tests.rkt.
As new languages are added, run-tests.rkt will be extended to
test new passes. You will be provided with new iterations of
the script for each assignment.