README
9cc C compiler
Note: 9cc is no longer an active project, and the successor is
chibicc.
9cc is a successor of my 8cc C compiler.
In this new project, I'm trying to write code that can be understood
extremely easily while creating a compiler that generates reasonably
efficient assembly.
9cc has more stages than 8cc. Here is an overview of the internals:
- Compiles an input string to abstract syntax trees.
- Runs a semantic analyzer on the trees to add a type to each tree node.
- Converts the trees to intermediate code (IR), which in some degree
resembles x86-64 instructions but has an infinite number of registers. - Maps an infinite number of registers to a finite number of registers.
- Generates x86-64 instructions from the IR.
There are a few important design choices that I made to keep the code as
simple as I can get:
-
Like 8cc, no memory management is the memory management policy in 9cc.
We allocate memory using malloc() but never call free().
I know that people find the policy odd, but this is actually a
reasonable design choice for short-lived programs such as compilers.
This policy greatly simplifies code and also eliminates use-after-free
bugs entirely. -
9cc's parser is a hand-written recursive descendent parser, so that the
compiler doesn't have any blackbox such as lex/yacc. -
I stick with plain old tools such as Make or shell script so that you
don't need to learn about new stuff other than the compiler source code
itself. -
We use brute force if it makes code simpler. We don't try too hard to
implement sophisticated data structures to make the compiler run faster.
If the performance becomes a problem, we can fix it at that moment. -
Entire contents are loaded into memory at once if it makes code simpler.
We don't use character IO to read from an input file; instead, we read
an entire file to a char array in a batch. Likewise, we tokenize a
whole file in a batch rather than doing it concurrently with the parser.
Overall, 9cc is still in its very early stage. I hope to continue
improving it to the point where 9cc can compile real-world C programs such
as Linux kernel. That is an ambitious goal, but I believe it's achievable,
so stay tuned!