bread VS bluebird

After several failed projects, I finally started work on (and have made a lot of progress on) a programming language project that I'm really happy with. My language bread is an expression based, dynamically typed, object oriented language scripting language. When I learned rust, I was particularly excited by the idea of having if-expressions (rather than if-statements) in an imperative language. I went with that idea, and made a language where pretty much everything (function definitions, loops, class definitions) is an expression. I'm not sure how useful the language is, but it's been a lot of fun to write and hopefully I'll find some use for it.

0 upto n and 0 thru n. I think I saw it in Bluebird first and really liked it.

Instead of the classic visitor pattern, I found it easier to create a class that basically wraps a big switch statement that switches on an enum representing the kind of expression. You pass it an expression, and based on the enum returned by its kind() function you downcast the expression into the subclass you need. The code is here for reference. My AST code is here.

I am working some again on my Ada-like language bluebird. I am making another attempt to use MLIR as an intermediate IR between the AST and LLVM IR (I made a brief attempt a few months ago just to look into it).

I fworked some more towards adding pointers on my Ada-like programming language bluebird. I've finished adding pointer types and variables (as well as the operators for dereferencing/getting the address of objects), but I still need to add the ability to dereference and assign.

I started to experiment with using MLIR to write a high-level IR for my language bluebird, which will hopefully reduce the work of implementing features I want to add such as generics and ranges, as well as allowing me to eventually write some optimizations. I am also considering rewriting my AST as an MLIR dialect, since MLIR provides a bunch of type-checking/error printing/support infrastructure.

I continued implementing support for references (a restricted form of pointers) in my Ada-like language bluebird. I also am working on adding a cleanup pass between my parser/typechecker to handle stuff like type resolution of literals and constant folding.

I didn’t add too many new features to my Ada-like language bluebird this month because of lots of projects/school stuff.

Here is a link to my optimizer pass setup for reference. This is just a simple optimization pipeline (I think clang has a setup where optimization stages are re-run multiple times to take advantage of inlining making more optimizations possible).

I made some more progress on bluebird, my Ada-like language.

I continued to make progress on the compiler for my Ada-inspired language bluebird. I will have less time to spend on it as classes began earlier last month, but I still hope to continue working on it. Things are getting to the point where adding a new feature isn’t as difficult as it was when doing so often meant writing the supporting code from nothing.