eddic 0.5.1 : Better assembly generation and faster parsing

I'm very pleased to release the version 0.5.1 of the EDDI Compiler.

It makes now a long time since the last version of eddic, but I started again working frequently on it. This version doesn't add any new feature to the language, but there are a lot of improvements in the compiler itself.

First of all, the generated assembly has been improved a lot. I use now a intermediate representation of assembly and then the compiler is able to make more optimizations in its choice. This optimization is especially visible for integer computations. Before this, all the computations used stack operations and then we use almost only registers when it's possible. It's still not perfect, but it uses way less instructions. Moreover, this can enable me to write a 64 assembly code instead of 32 and provide both versions in the compiler.

Another improvement is the speed of the parser. I now use Boost Spirit to parse the source file and construct an Abstract Syntax Tree. This parsing is very fast now (with some optimizations). Moreover, it will be easier to add new constructs later.

I also improved the general performances at some places. I also use Boost Program Options to parse the command line options.

In the next version (0.6.0), I will introduce arrays of int and strings and the foreach construct for array. I will also remove the dependency to malloc writing a memory allocation manager in assembly. I will also introduce warnings in the compiler.

You can find the compiler sources on the Github repository : https://github.com/wichtounet/eddic.

The compiler now needs Boost 1.47.0 to build.

The exact version I refer to is the v0.5.1 available in the github tags or directly as the release branch.

Related articles