Getting Started

Before we begin:

  • Windows is not natively supported yet, but WSL should work.
  • You'll need either GCC or Clang installed.

Bootstrap

Ideally, you'd pull the repo at ~/fu/, like so: 

cd ~
git clone [repo] fu
cd fu

To release-build a self-verifying compiler, run: 

./release-safe

This will recursively build several generations of the compiler, until you have latest-built-by-latest.

We don't "install" the compiler for you automatically - you can chose to either:

  • place ~/fu/bin in your PATH;
  • symlink or move ~/fu/bin/fu to a place of your liking;
  • or simply ~/fu/bin/fu instead of fu to invoke the compiler: 
~/fu/bin/fu

Hello! This is Fu v0.0.1

To get started:
    echo 'fn main() println("Hello world!");' >> hello.fu

Build it:
    ~/fu/bin/fu -b hello.fu

Run it:
    ./hello
        Hello world!

Compiler Development Setup

This being a research language, odds are you are interested in hacking on the compiler.

An external development watch-and-rebuild script is available: 

node watch.js

This builds and tests several generations of the compiler, immediately and on every compiler source change, always starting from a base bootstrap of a known-to-work historical compiler version.

Effectively, this limits the dialect of the language that is usable in the compiler itself to whatever is supported by the committed-in-repo known-to-work C++ sources. These sources are periodically updated, akin to an internal release, making newer syntax and language features available for compiler development.

Compiler Bug Auto-Reducer

Recursion is great at breaking our compiler, and the compiler itself is a heavily recursive program, which makes it great at breaking itself.

TODO cleanup & describe node reduce.js

Intrusive Compiler Profiler

TODO cleanup & describe ./perf