Awesome

`tan` programming language

Work In Progress

tan has been my hobby project for several years now. It helped me tremendously on understanding how compilers work, how large-scale software is structured (I read a lot of LLVM source code LOL), and how programming languages are designed. It will become a playground for me to work on interesting language designs. Needless to say, the design is never intended to be "better than xxx language".

I currently want it to:

Adapt some modern syntax
Support writing less painful and verbose OOP
Have strong and interesting meta-programming mechanism
Steal design from other languages such as Zig, Rust, Carbon, Python, C#, D, ...

Quickstart

A Quick Peek

See *.tan files under test/test_exec for some examples.

Prerequisites

Make sure to clone this repository using git clone --recursive, see submodules under dep/
CMake >=3.19
LLVM 15 tools and development libraries
See Dockerfile for a full list of dependencies

Building and Testing

tan uses CMake as its build system. Run the following command in project root directory to build and run all tests.

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make tests

Platforms

Platform	Status	Note
Linux	:heavy_check_mark:	Only tested on Ubuntu 20.04 for now
Windows	:heavy_exclamation_mark:	Build successfully, but clang doesn't run correctly on my machine
Mac	:x:	I don't have a mac. Mac is for superior people

CMake options

ENABLE_COVERAGE: bool, Enable test coverage, default OFF
BUILD_EXAMPLES: bool, Build tan examples, default OFF
ENABLE_CCACHE: bool, Enable ccache to speed up rebuilding, default ON
LLVM_ROOT_DIR: Custom LLVM location
CLANG_ROOT_DIR: Custom CLANG location
LLD_ROOT_DIR: Custom CLANG location

Documentation

Doxygen	https://tjysdsg.github.io/tan/html/index.html
Some markdown files in the source code	Search under src

Project Structure

dep: third-party dependencies
docs: documentations generated by Doxygen
examples: example programs written in tan and C
fuzzing: tools for fuzz testing, not updated for a long time
include: public headers
runtime: tan runtime source files (a mix of tan and C++)
scripts: utility scripts
src: source files
- analysis: code analysis and type checking
- ast: Abstract Syntax Tree
- backtrace: wrapper around libbacktrace
- base: should be named core loll
- cli: commandline interface of tanc compiler
- codegen: LLVM IR and binary object generation
- compiler: compiler driver
- lexer: lexer
- linker: linker implemented using clang frontend
- llvm_api: API wrappers for LLVM and clang
- parser: A hand-written parser
- source_file: Classes related to representing source files and text tokens
test: unittests and system tests (mostly system tests)
- test_exec: executable compilation tests
- test_lib: library compilation tests
- Some other unittests