cranelift-jit-demo VS slang-v2

I'm working on a small stack-based programming language. I'm currently at a stage where I'm trying to compile it using Cranelift. Altrough the Cranelift documentation is extensive, I'm lacking a broader picture on how to approach some things like heap-allocations and stack-management. The only example project I found are cranelift-jit-demo and this wonderful post.

First, it's much easier than you think, I swear. I strongly suggest that you start with the cranelift JIT toy language demo, it has everything that you need to get started.

Fyi I've checked a few (from here; https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs): - assembly script complier is written is typescript/javascript and in theory could be compiled to wasm, and hence could be embedded, but it is only theory as noone has managed to complete this flow - rust-driver requires the linker and calls it as an external tool to link the rustcore to the user code. without the core lib i could not manage to create anything usable. - zig (somewhat similar to rust): on discord some experr said it cannot be embedded and he see no option/plan for it. - lua: they have lua runtime running in wasm, but no transpiller to wasm I've also checked a few other without any success and closest I coild get was the example language for cranelift (https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift-jit-demo)

JITs are somehow more tricky and differ in the a few points including: a) Codegen is much more time critical. b) JITs must know what's allready generated and what isn't. c) JITs often rely on informations only generated at runtime and must respond to that. See here for a JIT example witten with cranelift: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift-jit-demo.

You could also try Cranelift. The resulting code isn't as optimized as with LLVM, but it's faster and pleasant to use (and is written in Rust).

Backend IRs for code generation: - Cranelift (see https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift-jit-demo as well as the messages on the Zulip chat if you get stuck)

As for LLVM, I'm not sure if there are any tutorials but I would really advise writing a bytecode interpreter first, unless you already have some grasp of assembly. However, this repository: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift-jit-demo is really great for learning cranelift which is essentially an LLVM alternative.

It was mainly built for wasm compilation. So no it is not married to rust. https://github.com/bytecodealliance/cranelift-jit-demo

The code that does this in Slang is here: https://github.com/mkhan45/slang-v2/blob/master/src/parser/for_parse.rs

Some of the design choices here might be a little strange, but I tried to explain them in comments. It runs quite fast (as expected since it only supports one datatype), and I've written a really rudimentary janky compiler for it. I plan on writing a more fleshed out compiler that takes advantage of all of its features whenever I have time.

I'm probably done with this for the forseeable future as of today but I've just made my first scripting language interpreter: https://github.com/mkhan45/slang-v2.