Compiler
========

This chapter describes the design of the compiler.
The compiler consists a frontend, mid-end and back-end. The frontend deals with
source file parsing and semantics checking. The mid-end performs optimizations.
This is optional. The back-end generates machine code. The front-end produces
intermediate code. This is a simple representation of the source. The back-end
can accept this kind of representation.

.. graphviz::
  
   digraph x {
   rankdir="LR"
   1 [label="c3 source file"]
   10 [label="c3 front end" ]
   11 [label="language X front end" ]
   20 [label="mid end" ]
   30 [label="back end for X86" ]
   31 [label="back end for ARM" ]
   40 [label="object file"]
   1 -> 10
   10 -> 20 [label="IR-code"]
   11 -> 20 [label="IR-code"]
   20 -> 30 [label="IR-code"]
   20 -> 31 [label="IR-code"]
   30 -> 40
   }


IR-code
-------

The intermediate representation (IR) of a program de-couples the front end
from the backend of the compiler.

See ir for details about all the available instructions.


C3 Front-end
------------

For the front-end a recursive descent parser is created for the c3 language.
This is a subset of the C language with some additional features.

.. graphviz::
  
   digraph c3 {
   rankdir="LR"
   1 [label="source text"]
   10 [label="lexer" ]
   20 [label="parser" ]
   30 [label="semantic checks" ]
   40 [label="code generation"]
   99 [label="IR-code object"]
   1 -> 10
   10 -> 20
   20 -> 30
   30 -> 40 [label="AST tree"]
   40 -> 99
   }

.. autoclass:: ppci.c3.Builder

.. autoclass:: ppci.c3.Parser

.. autoclass:: ppci.c3.CodeGenerator

Back-end
--------

The back-end is more complicated. There are several steps to be taken here.

1. Instruction selection
2. register allocation
3. Peep hole optimization?
4. real code generation

.. automodule:: codegen
   :members:

Instruction selection
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The instruction selection phase takes care of scheduling and instruction
selection.  The output of this phase is a one frame per function with a flat
list of abstract machine instructions.

.. autoclass:: irmach.Frame

.. autoclass:: irmach.AbstractInstruction