✏️ Pencil Compiler

pencilc is my toy compiler project to learn more about compilers and practice rust. The pencil language itself is a subset of rust designed for ease of use (and of implementation hehe).

Pencil

Pencil is a highly derivative toy language designed to be a subset of Rust.

Planned features

• Compiling files
• Control flow
• Strings
• Lists
• Custom structs
• Using external functions from libc

Usage

Simply point pencilc at your source file[s].

pencilc my_file.pencil

Run the help command to see all options

pencilc --help

Dependencies

To build pencilc you will require the following dependencies

• A rust toolchain
• LLVM v16 (note: can install using homebrew: brew install llvm)
• Just (optional)

Building

First clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/giraugh/pencilc

To build and use pencilc you will need to provide the path to your llvm installation. pencilc expects to see this in the form of an environment variable that points to your llvm path prefix (the path that /bin) is in.

(if you installed llvm using homebrew your prefix will be /opt/homebrew/opt/llvm)

The easiest way to do this is to create a .env file with your prefix in it. Then, when you run the build scripts with just it will automatically load the environment.

LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX=/your/path/to/llvm

Once you have your environment setup, you can use pencilc to compile a source file with just run <source_file>. You can also run just fixture to compile the provided sample.pcl and link it with fixture.c to print to stdout. Ater running just fixture you can run the executable with ./fixture.

If you'd prefer to not use just you can provide the environment as an argument when using cargo.

LLVM_SYS_160_PREFIX=/your/path/to/llvm cargo run -- my_file.pcl

To build pencilc and have it available without using cargo or just you can install it with cargo install.

Contributing

Any and all contributions are welcome!

License

Licensed under MIT (Please see the LICENSE file in the repo for more details)