qk

This is my work in progress compiler targeting the QBE backend for a custom language I'm designing.

Rationale

As this is my first compiler project, I wanted to keep things simple and not implement complex language features.

As a result of that, the language is simple and fairly similar to C in levels of complexitly. However, because it has been designed from the ground up, it decided to include some modern features that are not present in C but are easy enough to implement for a beginner such as myself.

Because of restricting myself to simple language features, where I took the most liberty with the design is probably the syntax, which while it is somewhat inspired by languages like Rust and Go, in many ways it is unique to this language.

My end goal is to reach the same level of usability as C, where any project can feasibly be implemented in this language instead of C.

However, I am not dumb, this is not a "C-killer" like other previously have claimed with their own (ekhm-ekhm V), because I am just a dumb kid with no prior background in compiler or language design, so I know my limitations.

Because my aim is to create a compiler, not design a language, it does not and probably will never have a formal specification or anything of that sort, and I will make up the language features as I go along.

As of writing this, the compiler is still not nearly finished and I have already found the codebase to be very cumbersome to work with and I see many design flaws I have made along the way, so as soon as I reach a certain level of maturity with this language, I will either abandon this project or rewrite it from scratch with better design choices, inspired by the mistakes I have in this first attempt.

Building

git clone git@github.com:marzeq/qk.git
cd qk
git config core.hooksPath .githooks # if you plan to contribue (so in reality, this is a note to self)

go build ./cmd/qkc # or run 'go run ./cmd/qkc' directly

Supported platforms

The compiler is limited by QBE which supports:

• Linux (x86-64, ARM64)
• Apple (x86-64, ARM64)

There is a special branch in QBE called winabi and I plan to vendor-in that branch to support Windows in the future, but not yet.

Dependencies

• Modern Go version
• QBE
• Standard POSIX build tools
• (in the future mingw for Windows support)

Examples

As I have previously mentioned, the language does not have a formal specification. However, there are some samples in the examples/ directory that showcase some of the language features, and while I added them primairly for testing purposes, you can of course use them as reference too.

Contributing

No, this is not a "serious" project, plese don't use or contribute to this.