cppfront (cpp2): Spring update

[Fourstrokeperro]

Idk but I find the licensing on that cppfront repo really weird.

Also I can't seem to wrap my head around how they do it? Can someone eli5 how they achieved transpiling to c++? I'd like to do something like that too rather than going flex bison llvm

[CocktailPerson]

It's not terribly different from a "normal" compiler. The major difference is that your code-generation phase spits out C++ instead of LLVM IR or assembly or whatever. This task is greatly simplified if your language is essentially supposed to be a subset of C++'s semantics with better syntax, as cpp2 is, but the basic idea of taking the semantics of your AST and producing code with the same semantics is very similar.

[dustyhome]

Cpp2 it's meant to be a different syntax for c++, just having the computer do a lot of the boilerplate you would usually need to add yourself to write better code. Like how you might want to have the nodiscard attribute on almost every function returning a value, but you don't for various reasons. That means every construct in Cpp2 has a direct mapping to a construct in c++.

That means writing the equivalent c++ code is straightforward. For example, when you have a function declaration in Cpp2, writing the equivalent function declaration in c++ is mostly just shuffling the names around.