These last two weeks have been quite slow on the code side of things, primarily because I've spent my time reading up on LLVM and secondarily because I have been less productive. Hopefully, this reasearch will allow me to actually get code generation working. This post is somewhat of a haphazard collection of notes about what I have read.
Unfortunately, the compilation process is very complicated. To create an executable in a scalable way, I must transform the code to LLVM IR, emit an object file, track which object files need to be used, and link them together. The IR creation step seems thankfully quite simple, but object files and linking can be quite confusing. For now, though, I plan on just generating a single object and executable, so I shouldn't have to worry too much.
The bindings to LLVM that I plan on using in the rustc_llvm crate are unstable and badly documented, but they seem to mainly correspond directly to LLVM functions, so I should hopefully be able to just follow the Kaleidoscope tutorial and this implementation of it. As of yet, durst has not control flow, which makes things easier.
Rustc, whose source I've been reading and modifying in hopes of understanding compilers better, is very complex. Unfortunately, I haven't really managed to get much about compiler design yet, since I'm having trouble even getting started with the whole compilation system.
Hopefully, I'll actually have significant code changes to talk about next week.
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