Tiger Compiler

Tiger Compiler from "Modern Compiler Implementation in ML" by Andrew W. Appel

Introduction

This is a Tiger compiler with all modules completed until Chapter 12 in the book. Basically I followed all the instructions from the book without much alternation. I also tried to adhere to the functional style as much as possible, that means, minimize the usage of mutable data structures.

Requirement

So far the compiler works with either mac or linux. Besides that, you need to have Standard ML and spim installed. Both of them can be fetched via homebrew.

Standard ML is obviously need to compile the programs. Since the compiler generates spim code, you'll need the SPIM simulator to actually run the executables.

Build

To build the compiler, simply run

make main

This will build the image using sources.cm. Note that it currently doesn't support windows.

Compile

Given a tiger source program foo.tig, to compile it, you'll need to first copy the file to the project directory, and run

make foo.spim

This will compile the file, append runtime.s to it, and generate a output SPIM program called foo.spim. Then to execute the program, run

spim -file foo.spim

If foo.spim exists, make will not overwrite it. You must remove the file before running make again.

Future Work

The second half of the book covers a lot of interesting stuff, and I'm thinking about extending the compile with the following features:

• Garbage Collection
• OO Features
• Functional Features
• Polymorphism and Type Inference
• Optimizations