README for the BLISS-M Compiler

This is the source package for the BLISS-M compiler, a portable cross-compiler for the BLISS programming language.

What is BLISS?

The BLISS language was developed at Carnegie-Mellon University in the 1970's for systems programming. It was adopted and used extensively by Digital Equipment Corporation for development of systems software across their 16-bit, 32-bit, 36-bit, and 64-bit systems. It is a typeless, block-structured, language with an extensive lexical processing (macro) facility. See the Wikipedia article on BLISS for more information about the language.

Current Status

Work in progress. The front-end is mostly complete, with a fully functioning parser and macro facility. Back-end support is currently limited to LLVM and x86 CPUs (32- or 64-bit), with a limited amount of machine-specific support.

Prerequisites

• Recent-vintage C compiler
• Recent version of LLVM (one that has support for opaque pointers)
• CMake 3.13 or later, or a recent version of autotools

Recent development and testing has been on Ubuntu 24.04 with gcc 13 and LLVM 14, 17, and 18.

Building the compiler

First, clone the repository.

Using Autotools

1. cd to the top-level source directory and run autoreconf -i.
2. If you want to build outside the source tree, cd to your build directory.
3. Run the configure script that was generated in step 2. If llvm-config is not in your PATH, use the --with-llvm-config option on configure to specify its location.
4. Run make to build the compiler.
5. Run make check to test the built compiler.

Using CMake

1. Create a directory for the build.
2. Run cmake <path-to-sources> to generate the build files. CMake will attempt to locate a usable copy of LLVM automatically, but you can specify -DLLVM_CONFIG= to force it to use a particular installation of LLVM.
3. Run make to build the compiler.

Running the compiler

The build will produce a program called blissc in your build directory. Run ./blissc --help for a description of the arguments and options.

License

All sources are released under the BSD 2-clause license. See the LICENSE.TXT file for the license text.