hCompiler

Compiler for subset of C language written in Haskell purely for fun

This is simple compiler for subset of C language written purely for fun - this means this project isn't associated with any university course, company etc. I wrote this, because I always wanted to know how compilers work, learn some assembly and Haskell.

What is supported:

• Recursive function calls
• Stack based memory allocation and variables naming
• 4-byte ints
• If and while.

Installation

Make sure you have cabal supporting sandboxes (this worked with cabal 1.24.0.0).

You need to prepare proper haskell packages first

cabal sandbox init
cabal install -j

When you have needed haskell packages it's time to compile project. The easiest way is to start cabal with new shell and run make:

cabal exec bash
make

You will also need 32-bit C library. On debian distros something like this should work:

sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib

Other

This project is very small and has many bugs and lacks ton of features. But you can't expect much from inexperienced student which spent around 4-5 days to get this working.

Overall structure of project:

• Parsing is done using Parsec
• Translating to assembly is done directly from parsed code to asm string.
• Asm string is used as an input to 'GNU as' which produces .o file
• .o file is then fed to gcc to link it with standard library, and trust me, getting this job done using ld is nightmare, at least if you try to see what flags gcc gives to ld.

Look into issues for more information.