Tiger on transcendental kyberautism

Making of Tiger #6, Stack frames

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Intro Link to heading

In this post we’re going to add support for stack frames. Here I’ve made some notes while reading the chapter 6 to make sure I understand things clearly.

A stack is a region of memory that grows downward and shrinks upward (like icicles). The top of the stack is it’s lowest memory address. We treat stack as a big array, with a special register – the stack pointer (SP).

Making of Tiger #3, Parsing

Sun, 08 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Intro Link to heading

In this chapter we’re going to build a parser for our Tiger language. First, let’s do a quick recap of some important concepts of the theory behind programming language parsers:

Parser generator is the most common type of compiler-compiler’s. It takes some formal grammar (typically it is a context-free grammar in BNF or EBNF form), that defines a syntax of a programming language.

Tiger grammar with Menhir Link to heading

While reading the current paragraph I highly recommend consulting the Tiger Language Reference Manual that has a precise description (along with a BNF notation) of everything we’re going to define below.

Making of Tiger #2, Lexical Analysis

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Intro Link to heading

We need a way to translate a program written in one (human-friendly) language to another (machine-specific) language. Generally, this work is splitted into 2 parts: analysis and synthesis.

The synthesis-part (back end) is responsible for the code generation and optimizations.

Analysis-part (front end) is responsible for breaking the program apart to understand its structure and meaning. There are 3 commonly used analysis phases:

Making of Tiger #1, Intro

Thu, 22 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve started reading the book by Andrew W. Appel titled Modern compiler implementation in ML. I’ve picked it up because I’ve heard some really good reviews about the ML version of it. Also there are other editions available that use C and Java. Each chapter covers a single phase of the compilation process and comes with some initial ML code and programming excercies. At the end you will have a working optimizing compiler.

Tiger on transcendental kyberautism

Making of Tiger #6, Stack frames

Intro Link to heading

Stack Link to heading

Making of Tiger #3, Parsing

Intro Link to heading

Tiger grammar with Menhir Link to heading

Making of Tiger #2, Lexical Analysis

Intro Link to heading

Making of Tiger #1, Intro