Homework instructions

For your homework exercises, you will be expected to implement various compiler passes. It will ultimately be up to you how exactly to do this, but for the first assignment you are given code templates in compiler.rkt to fill out.

To start out, you must "clone" this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/public-student-support-code.git course-compiler

This creates a new folder course-compiler, which you can enter with:

   cd course-compiler

Before each assignment (and when told to by the instructor), you may need to update this code by pulling updates from GitHub by running this command from inside the folder:

   git pull

As you fill out the functions in compiler.rkt, tests are run with the run-tests.rkt module. You can run these tests either from the command line with:

   racket run-tests.rkt

Or by opening and running run-tests.rkt in DrRacket.

Before running the compiler tests, you need to compile runtime.c (see below).

Public student code

Utility code, test suites, etc. for the compiler course.

This code will be described in the Appendix of the book.

The runtime.c file needs to be compiled and linked with the assembly code that your compiler produces. To compile runtime.c, do the following

   gcc -c -g -std=c99 runtime.c

This will produce a file named runtime.o. The -g flag is to tell the compiler to produce debug information that you may need to use the gdb (or lldb) debugger.

On a Mac with an M1 (ARM) processor, use the -arch x86_64 flag to compile the runtime:

   gcc -c -g -std=c99 -arch x86_64 runtime.c

Next, suppose your compiler has translated the Racket program in file foo.rkt into the x86 assembly program in file foo.s (The .s filename extension is the standard one for assembly programs.) To produce an executable program, you can then do

  gcc -g runtime.o foo.s

which will produce the executable program named a.out.

There is an example "compiler" in the file compiler.rkt. That file defines two passes that translate R_0 programs to R_0 programs and tests them using the interp-tests function from utilities.rkt. It tests the passes on the three example programs in the tests subdirectory. You may find it amusing (I did!) to insert bugs in the compiler and see the errors reported. Note that interp-tests does not test the final output assembly code; you need to use compiler-tests for that purpose. The usage of compiler-tests is quite similar to interp-tests. Example uses of these testing procedures appear in run-tests.rkt.

As new languages are added, run-tests.rkt will be extended to test new passes. You will be provided with new iterations of the script for each assignment.