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| <title>Kaleidoscope: Tutorial Introduction and the Lexer</title> |
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| <h1>Kaleidoscope: Tutorial Introduction and the Lexer</h1> |
| |
| <ul> |
| <li><a href="index.html">Up to Tutorial Index</a></li> |
| <li>Chapter 1 |
| <ol> |
| <li><a href="#intro">Tutorial Introduction</a></li> |
| <li><a href="#language">The Basic Language</a></li> |
| <li><a href="#lexer">The Lexer</a></li> |
| </ol> |
| </li> |
| <li><a href="LangImpl2.html">Chapter 2</a>: Implementing a Parser and AST</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <div class="doc_author"> |
| <p>Written by <a href="mailto:sabre@nondot.org">Chris Lattner</a></p> |
| </div> |
| |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| <h2><a name="intro">Tutorial Introduction</a></h2> |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| |
| <div> |
| |
| <p>Welcome to the "Implementing a language with LLVM" tutorial. This tutorial |
| runs through the implementation of a simple language, showing how fun and |
| easy it can be. This tutorial will get you up and started as well as help to |
| build a framework you can extend to other languages. The code in this tutorial |
| can also be used as a playground to hack on other LLVM specific things. |
| </p> |
| |
| <p> |
| The goal of this tutorial is to progressively unveil our language, describing |
| how it is built up over time. This will let us cover a fairly broad range of |
| language design and LLVM-specific usage issues, showing and explaining the code |
| for it all along the way, without overwhelming you with tons of details up |
| front.</p> |
| |
| <p>It is useful to point out ahead of time that this tutorial is really about |
| teaching compiler techniques and LLVM specifically, <em>not</em> about teaching |
| modern and sane software engineering principles. In practice, this means that |
| we'll take a number of shortcuts to simplify the exposition. For example, the |
| code leaks memory, uses global variables all over the place, doesn't use nice |
| design patterns like <a |
| href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visitor_pattern">visitors</a>, etc... but it |
| is very simple. If you dig in and use the code as a basis for future projects, |
| fixing these deficiencies shouldn't be hard.</p> |
| |
| <p>I've tried to put this tutorial together in a way that makes chapters easy to |
| skip over if you are already familiar with or are uninterested in the various |
| pieces. The structure of the tutorial is: |
| </p> |
| |
| <ul> |
| <li><b><a href="#language">Chapter #1</a>: Introduction to the Kaleidoscope |
| language, and the definition of its Lexer</b> - This shows where we are going |
| and the basic functionality that we want it to do. In order to make this |
| tutorial maximally understandable and hackable, we choose to implement |
| everything in C++ instead of using lexer and parser generators. LLVM obviously |
| works just fine with such tools, feel free to use one if you prefer.</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl2.html">Chapter #2</a>: Implementing a Parser and |
| AST</b> - With the lexer in place, we can talk about parsing techniques and |
| basic AST construction. This tutorial describes recursive descent parsing and |
| operator precedence parsing. Nothing in Chapters 1 or 2 is LLVM-specific, |
| the code doesn't even link in LLVM at this point. :)</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl3.html">Chapter #3</a>: Code generation to LLVM IR</b> - |
| With the AST ready, we can show off how easy generation of LLVM IR really |
| is.</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl4.html">Chapter #4</a>: Adding JIT and Optimizer |
| Support</b> - Because a lot of people are interested in using LLVM as a JIT, |
| we'll dive right into it and show you the 3 lines it takes to add JIT support. |
| LLVM is also useful in many other ways, but this is one simple and "sexy" way |
| to shows off its power. :)</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl5.html">Chapter #5</a>: Extending the Language: Control |
| Flow</b> - With the language up and running, we show how to extend it with |
| control flow operations (if/then/else and a 'for' loop). This gives us a chance |
| to talk about simple SSA construction and control flow.</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl6.html">Chapter #6</a>: Extending the Language: |
| User-defined Operators</b> - This is a silly but fun chapter that talks about |
| extending the language to let the user program define their own arbitrary |
| unary and binary operators (with assignable precedence!). This lets us build a |
| significant piece of the "language" as library routines.</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl7.html">Chapter #7</a>: Extending the Language: Mutable |
| Variables</b> - This chapter talks about adding user-defined local variables |
| along with an assignment operator. The interesting part about this is how |
| easy and trivial it is to construct SSA form in LLVM: no, LLVM does <em>not</em> |
| require your front-end to construct SSA form!</li> |
| <li><b><a href="LangImpl8.html">Chapter #8</a>: Conclusion and other useful LLVM |
| tidbits</b> - This chapter wraps up the series by talking about potential |
| ways to extend the language, but also includes a bunch of pointers to info about |
| "special topics" like adding garbage collection support, exceptions, debugging, |
| support for "spaghetti stacks", and a bunch of other tips and tricks.</li> |
| |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p>By the end of the tutorial, we'll have written a bit less than 700 lines of |
| non-comment, non-blank, lines of code. With this small amount of code, we'll |
| have built up a very reasonable compiler for a non-trivial language including |
| a hand-written lexer, parser, AST, as well as code generation support with a JIT |
| compiler. While other systems may have interesting "hello world" tutorials, |
| I think the breadth of this tutorial is a great testament to the strengths of |
| LLVM and why you should consider it if you're interested in language or compiler |
| design.</p> |
| |
| <p>A note about this tutorial: we expect you to extend the language and play |
| with it on your own. Take the code and go crazy hacking away at it, compilers |
| don't need to be scary creatures - it can be a lot of fun to play with |
| languages!</p> |
| |
| </div> |
| |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| <h2><a name="language">The Basic Language</a></h2> |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| |
| <div> |
| |
| <p>This tutorial will be illustrated with a toy language that we'll call |
| "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope">Kaleidoscope</a>" (derived |
| from "meaning beautiful, form, and view"). |
| Kaleidoscope is a procedural language that allows you to define functions, use |
| conditionals, math, etc. Over the course of the tutorial, we'll extend |
| Kaleidoscope to support the if/then/else construct, a for loop, user defined |
| operators, JIT compilation with a simple command line interface, etc.</p> |
| |
| <p>Because we want to keep things simple, the only datatype in Kaleidoscope is a |
| 64-bit floating point type (aka 'double' in C parlance). As such, all values |
| are implicitly double precision and the language doesn't require type |
| declarations. This gives the language a very nice and simple syntax. For |
| example, the following simple example computes <a |
| href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number">Fibonacci numbers:</a></p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| # Compute the x'th fibonacci number. |
| def fib(x) |
| if x < 3 then |
| 1 |
| else |
| fib(x-1)+fib(x-2) |
| |
| # This expression will compute the 40th number. |
| fib(40) |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>We also allow Kaleidoscope to call into standard library functions (the LLVM |
| JIT makes this completely trivial). This means that you can use the 'extern' |
| keyword to define a function before you use it (this is also useful for mutually |
| recursive functions). For example:</p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| extern sin(arg); |
| extern cos(arg); |
| extern atan2(arg1 arg2); |
| |
| atan2(sin(.4), cos(42)) |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>A more interesting example is included in Chapter 6 where we write a little |
| Kaleidoscope application that <a href="LangImpl6.html#example">displays |
| a Mandelbrot Set</a> at various levels of magnification.</p> |
| |
| <p>Lets dive into the implementation of this language!</p> |
| |
| </div> |
| |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| <h2><a name="lexer">The Lexer</a></h2> |
| <!-- *********************************************************************** --> |
| |
| <div> |
| |
| <p>When it comes to implementing a language, the first thing needed is |
| the ability to process a text file and recognize what it says. The traditional |
| way to do this is to use a "<a |
| href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis">lexer</a>" (aka 'scanner') |
| to break the input up into "tokens". Each token returned by the lexer includes |
| a token code and potentially some metadata (e.g. the numeric value of a number). |
| First, we define the possibilities: |
| </p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| // The lexer returns tokens [0-255] if it is an unknown character, otherwise one |
| // of these for known things. |
| enum Token { |
| tok_eof = -1, |
| |
| // commands |
| tok_def = -2, tok_extern = -3, |
| |
| // primary |
| tok_identifier = -4, tok_number = -5, |
| }; |
| |
| static std::string IdentifierStr; // Filled in if tok_identifier |
| static double NumVal; // Filled in if tok_number |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>Each token returned by our lexer will either be one of the Token enum values |
| or it will be an 'unknown' character like '+', which is returned as its ASCII |
| value. If the current token is an identifier, the <tt>IdentifierStr</tt> |
| global variable holds the name of the identifier. If the current token is a |
| numeric literal (like 1.0), <tt>NumVal</tt> holds its value. Note that we use |
| global variables for simplicity, this is not the best choice for a real language |
| implementation :). |
| </p> |
| |
| <p>The actual implementation of the lexer is a single function named |
| <tt>gettok</tt>. The <tt>gettok</tt> function is called to return the next token |
| from standard input. Its definition starts as:</p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| /// gettok - Return the next token from standard input. |
| static int gettok() { |
| static int LastChar = ' '; |
| |
| // Skip any whitespace. |
| while (isspace(LastChar)) |
| LastChar = getchar(); |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p> |
| <tt>gettok</tt> works by calling the C <tt>getchar()</tt> function to read |
| characters one at a time from standard input. It eats them as it recognizes |
| them and stores the last character read, but not processed, in LastChar. The |
| first thing that it has to do is ignore whitespace between tokens. This is |
| accomplished with the loop above.</p> |
| |
| <p>The next thing <tt>gettok</tt> needs to do is recognize identifiers and |
| specific keywords like "def". Kaleidoscope does this with this simple loop:</p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| if (isalpha(LastChar)) { // identifier: [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]* |
| IdentifierStr = LastChar; |
| while (isalnum((LastChar = getchar()))) |
| IdentifierStr += LastChar; |
| |
| if (IdentifierStr == "def") return tok_def; |
| if (IdentifierStr == "extern") return tok_extern; |
| return tok_identifier; |
| } |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>Note that this code sets the '<tt>IdentifierStr</tt>' global whenever it |
| lexes an identifier. Also, since language keywords are matched by the same |
| loop, we handle them here inline. Numeric values are similar:</p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| if (isdigit(LastChar) || LastChar == '.') { // Number: [0-9.]+ |
| std::string NumStr; |
| do { |
| NumStr += LastChar; |
| LastChar = getchar(); |
| } while (isdigit(LastChar) || LastChar == '.'); |
| |
| NumVal = strtod(NumStr.c_str(), 0); |
| return tok_number; |
| } |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>This is all pretty straight-forward code for processing input. When reading |
| a numeric value from input, we use the C <tt>strtod</tt> function to convert it |
| to a numeric value that we store in <tt>NumVal</tt>. Note that this isn't doing |
| sufficient error checking: it will incorrectly read "1.23.45.67" and handle it as |
| if you typed in "1.23". Feel free to extend it :). Next we handle comments: |
| </p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| if (LastChar == '#') { |
| // Comment until end of line. |
| do LastChar = getchar(); |
| while (LastChar != EOF && LastChar != '\n' && LastChar != '\r'); |
| |
| if (LastChar != EOF) |
| return gettok(); |
| } |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>We handle comments by skipping to the end of the line and then return the |
| next token. Finally, if the input doesn't match one of the above cases, it is |
| either an operator character like '+' or the end of the file. These are handled |
| with this code:</p> |
| |
| <div class="doc_code"> |
| <pre> |
| // Check for end of file. Don't eat the EOF. |
| if (LastChar == EOF) |
| return tok_eof; |
| |
| // Otherwise, just return the character as its ascii value. |
| int ThisChar = LastChar; |
| LastChar = getchar(); |
| return ThisChar; |
| } |
| </pre> |
| </div> |
| |
| <p>With this, we have the complete lexer for the basic Kaleidoscope language |
| (the <a href="LangImpl2.html#code">full code listing</a> for the Lexer is |
| available in the <a href="LangImpl2.html">next chapter</a> of the tutorial). |
| Next we'll <a href="LangImpl2.html">build a simple parser that uses this to |
| build an Abstract Syntax Tree</a>. When we have that, we'll include a driver |
| so that you can use the lexer and parser together. |
| </p> |
| |
| <a href="LangImpl2.html">Next: Implementing a Parser and AST</a> |
| </div> |
| |
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| <a href="mailto:sabre@nondot.org">Chris Lattner</a><br> |
| <a href="http://llvm.org/">The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure</a><br> |
| Last modified: $Date: 2011-04-22 20:30:22 -0400 (Fri, 22 Apr 2011) $ |
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