DeafShark

The DeafShark Programming Language implemented in Swift and LLVM

How Do I Try It?

You can't do much yet...but if you really want to, jump to the bottom.

Why?

Why not? Next question.

Discussion

Current Language Status: Mostly Aimless

I've started writing this language because I've always enjoyed low level programming and making things to make other things. There isn't exactly a problem this language is meant to solve. It's a programming language that can hopefully be used as a general purpose programming language. I'm taking inspiration from the Swift syntax, though I want it to be different as well (hard as that may be). I plan for this language to be suitable for things like systems programming to quick scripting. This is a learning experience the whole way but let's hope something semi useful comes out of it.

Implementation

[  Source File  ] -> [  Lexer  ] -> [  Parser  ] -> [  Compiler  ] -> [  Binary  ]

Code will be written in source files which is chopped into a large array of tokens by the lexer. The parser then analyzes the tokens for syntax errors and creates an Abstract Syntax Tree. The compiler will then use this to translate the higher level code into LLVM IR "assembly" which will then be compiled into an executable binary.

Sample Syntax

let x = 5 + 5
var y as Int

func add(x as Int, y as Int) -> Int {
  return x + y
}

Aknowledgments

Thank you to the Nifty project by Mitchell Allison for giving me a jumpstart on the lexer and parser for DeafShark since much of the syntax is similar to Swift.

Try it out

Checkout the Develop branch for the bleeding edge changes.

• Make sure you have LLVM installed because you'll need it. Here is a quick guide for installing LLVM on OS X.
• Next clone the repository and open up the Xcode project.
• Create a file called hello.ds (or whatever you want so long as it ends with .ds). In that file put print("Hello, World").
• You'll need to add the location of your source file as a commandline argument to the Scheme (upper left where it says DeafShark).
• Optionally you can add the -o argument and another argument that is the location to store the output file (use the full path, otherwise it dumps the file with the debug executable).
• When you run the compiler, it will dump out the AST of the source as well as the LLVM IR code. This is mainly for debug purposes and will likely be removed in the future
• When the program finishes, you should have a binary file by the same name as your input file. If this didn't work, there is a chance your llvm executables are in a different place. Edit line 9 of the file /usr/local/DeafShark/compileandlink.sh to point to the location of llc on your machine. If this still doens't work, then it is most likely because your using parts of the language that have not been developed yet.

Congratulations! You just wrote and ran your first DeafShark program! Probably pretty underwhelming at this point in the development. In the future, I plan to have executable versions of the DeafShark compiler that can be run from the command line.