Viz Programming Language

Getting Started

Environment Setup

Need to ensure that you have the following software installed.
ocaml = 4.13.1 (group lets discuss...)
dune >= 3.0
llvm = 11.0.0 or Docker installed to build our container image with LLVM installed (see below)

Why is Viz Docker Image Needed?

Either the user could have LLVM locally installed (kinda complicated) or install and run our Docker container (prepackaged with LLVM). We need LLVM in order to compile our code to IR, and ultimately to build and run the executable. Follow the below instructions

Build Viz Docker Image

Make sure that you have Docker Desktop downloaded and running, and then use the following commands to build our viz container.

Make Sure You Have Docker Installed and Running

# build our container
docker build -t viz .

# if you see the below error, when building the viz containen then rune the below command
if "ERROR [7/9] COPY ./viz.opam ." upon docker build 

dune build

At this point, the container image should be downloaded

To use the bash of the docker container:

Start the container if it's not running.

docker start <container_name>

launch the container

This command will place you inside the container at the root, and you can run any
of the tests in the next section without fear of software dependency issues.

# from /viz root directory
./launch-container.sh

Building the Code

At this point you should have built the Viz Docker Image, and be inside the container. That will ensure no issues with running any of the following commands.

Build the Viz compiler files

dune clean /* clean the Dune _build folder */
dune build /* build our compiler code */

Running Viz Test Suite

Compiling an Individual .viz Program at a Particular Build Stage

We leverage the Dune Build system to compile our program with different flags
and show the corresponding output. Check viz/bin/vc.ml for more details.

# from /viz root directory
dune exec -- vc <program-name>.viz  -ts   /* scan tokens and print to stdout */
dune exec -- vc <program-name>.viz  -a    /* abstract syntax tree */
dune exec -- vc <program-name>.viz  -s    /* semantically checked abstract syntax tree */
dune exec -- vc <program-name>.viz  -l    /* LLVM IR */

Run Our Scanner Test Suite

# from /viz root directory
cd test/scanner
./script-token-scanning.sh

Run Our Parser Test Suite

# from /viz root directory
cd test/parser
./script-parsing.sh

Run Our Semantic Test Suite

# from /viz root directory
cd test/semantic
./script-semantic.sh

Compile and Run Test Programs

# from /viz root directory
./script-test-programs.sh

Run the Full Automated Test Suite (Recommended)

This shell script will run all of the tests across all of the test/* 
directories.
# from /viz root directory
./run_viz_tests.sh

Compile and Run a Singular Test program

./viz test/programs/helloworld.viz

VizOnline Text Editor

We have implemented an online text editor for our language in order to provide Viz programming language users a more interactive way of developing code. With this deployed web application, the user doesn’t have to worry about having Dune, Ocaml, and LLVM installed locally on their machine. VizOnline affords users the ability to write, compile, and run viz source code in an online text editor. Furthermore, we provide a look into what happens under the hood during compilation through 6 different run options:

Running the code and displaying output
A look at the full build process
Displaying the parsed abstract syntax tree
Presenting the syntactically checked abstract syntax tree
Viewing the LLVM IR assembly code
Seeing how programs are scanned into tokens

Web Hosted Text Editor

http://ec2-23-22-206-12.compute-1.amazonaws.com/

We have the frontend application located at the below repo. The code is ready to clone and run locally, and instructions are present there.

https://github.com/jakobgabrield/vizonline