I compiled my first compiler today 🕺

I stumbled on the S.I.M.P.L.E programming language yesterday and I found myself excited and intrigued.

I felt the child-like, adventurous me stir in his sweet, sweet slumber and I think he may just be awake.

What that will bring, we are yet to see.

I decided I must try this out on my computer and asked its creator, Azeez Adewale, for help with this.

However, only a windows build was available, so I was supposed to build the compiler source code for macOS.

I hadn’t used the C programming language since 100 level “Introduction to Computer Science” class when Mr. J. made it a complete bore, so I was ecstatic about this.

How it’s done

Compiling C code is done with the gcc command traditionally, and clang on recent macOS versions.

Because there were multiple files to be compiled, I had to use a Makefile, which, in hindsight, is actually much easier than it sounds.

This tutorial made me confident that I could do it, and this other one helped me light the way. 🔥

What I eventually did

In the end, I found I had to place the Makefile in the same directory as the *.c files, which makes sense, because the *.c files reference the *.h files.

So, I ended up with this:

Hehehe 😝 … from zero to warrisdis?

This creates user-defined constants at the top of the file like program_NAME and adds values to special constants like CPPFLAGS.

It then builds the output for each *.c file into an equivalent *.o output file in the same directory, then somehow bundles all the *.o files into a dynamic linked library called simple.dylib.

The simple.dylibis similar to a DLL file used in windows programs, so it’s a library which needs an executable.

Azeez provided one called simple.c:

#include "./includes/simple.h"

int main(int argc, char** argv) {

  simple_state_main(argc,argv);

  return 0;

}

This is done by line 21 in the Makefile above, which outputs an executable file called a.out

The remaining lines in the Makefile perform cleanup operations like deleting all *.o files, and moving simple.dylib and a.out to the already createddist directory.