Adding a new programming language

Adding a new programming language

Adding a new programming language to Vipera can be as easy as adding a new parser to the Olympus native code generation framework. If additional languages features over and above those provided by Olympus are required, these can be easily added to the framework. For example, new types can be added to the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), along with their supporting code generation functions as outlined in the next article Olympus native code generation framework.

Table of Contents

  1. Simple expressions
  2. More complex expressions
  3. Typing the AST

Simple expressions

An easy way to start is to look at the vPython parser defined in the vpython.y Bison parser generator grammar file. Here, you will see how the grammar rules map to the functions defined in vpython.c that create the respective AST nodes. For example, the following Bison grammar file snippet for vPython calls the appendWhileStatement() function declared in vpython.h:

# From vpython.y grammar file
| WHILE expression COLON codeblock { $$=appendWhileStatement($2, $4); }

The appendWhileStatement() function is simply defined in vpython.c as follows:

/* From vpython.c */
ASTexpression* appendWhileStatement(ASTexpression* expression, ASTexpression* block) {
	return ast_makeExpression(AST_WHILE, expression, block);
}

As we can see, it just calls the Olympus compiler framework function ast_makeExpression() with the operation AST_WHILE, the test expression and the block / body of the loop. Relational expressions are created in a similar manner, with the left-hand side expression1 and right-hand side expression2:

# From vpython.y grammar file
relational_expression
        : additive_expression { $$=$1; }
        | relational_expression GT additive_expression { $$=createGtExpression($1, $3); }
        | relational_expression LT additive_expression { $$=createLtExpression($1, $3); }
        | relational_expression LEQ additive_expression { $$=createLeqExpression($1, $3); }
        | relational_expression GEQ additive_expression { $$=createGeqExpression($1, $3); }

/* From vpython.c */
ASTexpression* createGtExpression(ASTexpression* expression1, ASTexpression* expression2) {
	return ast_makeExpression(AST_GT, expression1, expression2);
}

ASTexpression* createLtExpression(ASTexpression* expression1, ASTexpression* expression2) {
	return ast_makeExpression(AST_LT, expression1, expression2);
}

ASTexpression* createLeqExpression(ASTexpression* expression1, ASTexpression* expression2) {
	return ast_makeExpression(AST_LEQ, expression1, expression2);
}

ASTexpression* createGeqExpression(ASTexpression* expression1, ASTexpression* expression2) {
	return ast_makeExpression(AST_GEQ, expression1, expression2);
}

More complex expressions

More complex expression types have specific AST node types and creation functions. For example, the if: ... else: statement:

# From vpython.y grammar file
| IF expression COLON codeblock ELSE COLON codeblock { $$=appendIfElseStatement($2, $4, $7); }

/* From vpython.c */
ASTexpression* appendIfElseStatement(ASTexpression* expressionContainer, 
                                     ASTexpression* thenBlock, 
                                     ASTexpression* elseBlock) {
  ASTstack conditions;

  INIT_STACK(conditions);
  PUSH(conditions, ast_makeExpression(AST_CONDITION, expressionContainer, thenBlock)); 
  return ast_makeCaseClause(&conditions, elseBlock);
}

Here, we create a AST_CASE node via the Olympus ast_makeCaseClause() function, which takes a list (stack) of conditional expressions and a default statement. For vPython we only create if: ... else: chains as Python does not support case statements but we use the Olympus case support with a single condition and a default statement as the else clause.

NOTE: Simple expression grammar rules could directly call the ast_makeExpression() function with the relevant ASToperation (AST_ADD, AST_GT, AST_WHILE etc.) rather than calling a function in the parser C file (e.g. vpython.c). However, for vPython, this indirection allows the same Bison grammar file to be used for both the virtual machine compiler and the Olympus native code compiler.

Typing the AST

In the case of vPython the AST nodes are traversed to perform dynamic type inferencing in order to determine the type of a variable. The type inferencer also determines the types of the function arguments and return values, creating polymorphic variants of functions, as required. This enables the generation of optimised type frozen native Olympus abstract machine code. In essence, the dynamically-typed vPython variable types are frozen until they change type. This removes the requirement to dynamically type check variables and function dispatch at runtime, greatly increasing the performance of compiled codes.

The Olympus compiler also performs a separate pass of the code for optimisation e.g. constant folding and this can be extended, as required.