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A Simple showcase for the Sea-of-Nodes compiler IR

This repo is intended to demonstrate the Sea-of-Nodes compiler IR.

The Sea-of-Nodes is the core IR inside of HotSpot's C2 compiler and Google's V8 compiler and Sun/Oracle's Graal compiler.

Since we are show casing the SoN IR, the language being implemented is less important. We're using a very simple language similar to C or Java, but with far fewer features. Simple is strongly typed, object-oriented, with first- class functions not closures. Object references are pointers, and null pointer exceptions are disallowed by the typing system. Arrays will probably be range-checked at some point, making Simple a fully safe language. Simple has a minimal syntax that can be parsed with a recursive descent parser.

The Sea-of-Nodes is used for machine code generation in these industrial strength systems - but for this demonstration the backend is both difficult and less important. This repo will eventually target X86 and at least one more machine with ahead-of-time compilation - but with an eye to JIT compilation.

This repo also is not intended to be a complete language in any sense, and so the backend starts with levering Java: the Evaluator (first appears in Chapter 10) directly slowly interprets the SoN IR. Code-gen first appears in Chapter 19.

Chapters

The following is a rough plan, subject to change.

Each chapter will be self-sufficient and complete; in the sense that each chapter will fully implement a subset of the Simple language, and include everything that was created in the previous chapter. Each chapter will also include a detailed commentary on relevant aspects of the Sea Of Nodes intermediate representation.

The Simple language will be styled after a subset of C or Java