This is a back end for the Ceylon compiler which outputs native binaries via the LLVM compiler framework.
It's all pretty experimental at the moment, but there's enough here to play with.
At the moment this project doesn't have a formal back-end name (the name that
you'd give to Ceylon's native annotation to add native methods).
Originally this was to be the llvm back end, but naming our binary back end
after the specific tool chain we happen to use seemed unwise. It is called the
native back end in command names right now, as in compile-native, but it is
called the baremetal backend in code. We will probably standardize on the
latter.
You'll need the Ceylon native runtime
in order to build and run Ceylon native packages. It's installed with the usual
./configure && make && make install recipe, and has no real dependencies
other than the standard Linux userspace. This package will provide
libceylon.so (Implementations for various native methods in the language
module) and ceylon-launcher, which will be installed into your libexec
folder, and will be necessary for executing native Ceylon.
You'll also need an install of clang on top of LLVM 3.6 or 3.7. Other versions may work, but the LLVM IR format is slightly unstable, and only those two versions are explicitly checked for.
You can compile your native modules with ceylon compile-native mymodule. This
will create module files in your output repository with the extension .cso.
Running your .cso is slightly more complex, as there isn't yet a working
ceylon run-native. You will have to run ceylon-launcher out of libexec
directly. Pass it the path to your module and all dependent modules
(excluding the language module). The module you are running (which contains
your run function) should come first.
Not much right now. The only supported data types are classes you create and
Strings. print is working. Most expressions and operators do not yet work.
Variadic arguments do not work. Multiple parameter
lists do not work. Like I said, not much works.