The Plasm compiler

Experimental, compiled, strongly-typed, functional, system programming language that inherits memory regions ideas, focused on dev experience, extensibility and reliability.

Mainly inspired by Rust's type system, Verona's and Pony's memory managment systems, Python's simplicity, Koka's effect system, and Zig's comptime.

Early stage roadmap (MVP)

This is the roadmap for implementing a minimal working framework that will serve as the base for the proposed innovative features. Basically, this is the way to create a "Rustic C" compiler.

• Lexer & tokens stream
• AST definition
• AST parser
• HIR/OptHIR/THIR definitions
• AST to OptHIR translator
• OptHIR to THIR translator (type inference)
• MIR definition
• THIR to MIR lowering
• MIR to LLVM-IR lowering
• LLVM-IR to object file compilation
• object files linking

Quick Start

For cli help reference:

cargo run --help

For example, following command will parse test.sm file, analyse, stop on HIR stage and emit the result in a text format:

cargo run emit test.sm --stage hir --format text

The compilation flow

                                 HIR                               Codegen (LLVM)
                           ________________             _____________________________________
                          |                |           |                                     |
 code -> tokens -> AST -> | OptHIR -> THIR | -> MIR -> | LLVM-IR -> ASM -----> artifacts ----|--> linker -> Exe
   |        |       |     |_____________|__|     |     |             |     (.o/.a/.bc/.wasm) |
   |        |----> CST                  |        |     |_____________|_______________________|
   |                |                   |        |                   |
   |                |                   |        |                   |
Visible         Visible              Visible  Visible             Visible
in IDE          in IDE               in IDE   in IDE              in IDE


AST         Abstract Syntax Tree
CST         Concrete Syntax Tree
IR          Intermediate Representation
HIR         High-level IR
OptHIR      Optionally typed HIR
THIR        Typed HIR
MIR         Middle-level IR
Codegen     Code Generation
LLVM        A external compiler backend
ASM         Assembler
Exe         Executable file
CLI         Command Line Interface

Sub-modules description

• ast/ - Abstract Syntax Tree + Parser
• cli/ - Command Line Interface wrapper
• codegen/ - LLVM-IR + translator from MIR to LLVM-IR + artifacts generation utilities
• diagnostic/ - Utilities to track errors during compilation process like Span, code snippets, and errors container
• examples/ - Plasm language examples
• hir/ - High-level IR, OptHIR, THIR + translator from AST + types annotator
• mir/ - Middle-level IR + translator from HIR
• orchestrator/ - Compilation flow management utilities (Parallel compilation, linkers controller, configuration reader)
• tokenizer/ - Tokens description + lexer + from bytes to tokens stream

Internal dependencies:

orchestrator    diagnostic -> tokenizer -> ast -> hir -> mir -> codegen
      ^            | |            |        ^ |    ^ |     |        |
      |            | |            |        | |    | |     |        |
      |            |_|____________|________|_|____| |     |        |
      |              |            |          |      |     |        |
      |______________|____________|__________|______|_____|________|