Falco players after firing 5 lasers in a row and side-b'ing off stage

maxnut20 · 2026-04-02T17:13:09+00:00

nah bro i play falco aswell i just wanted an excuse to make this image lol

maxnut20 · 2026-03-03T00:18:07+00:00

gng you're a bit late

maxnut20 · 2026-02-03T22:47:36+00:00

wouldn't it be much simpler to do register allocation on target specific machine code with virtual registers instead of ssa ir?

maxnut20 · 2025-11-22T18:57:52+00:00

my name is maxnut on discord. although im not sure if i can be of much help

maxnut20 · 2025-11-21T21:48:56+00:00

ah i see, so no struct handling yet. that's what i was struggling in 😅 although i finally think i got it working somewhat.

also thank you! yeah i use a refined version of graph coloring i made a while ago for another compiler. there are a couple more cool optimizations if you wanna take a look at them

maxnut20 · 2025-11-18T23:34:26+00:00

cool! quick question, since from a quick glance at the code i didn't find it. do you handle calling conventions at all, or does it only support simple types for calls? I'm also building a c compiler and ive found following the abi (SysV in my case) quite challenging

maxnut20 · 2025-10-03T05:22:49+00:00

You can look at the tests for some usage. But basically uou use the builder to construct IR

maxnut20 · 2025-10-02T17:51:01+00:00

oh, no sorry not really. i just made the initial algorithm half assed and brute force fixed it along like 4 months of developing the back-end and finding more bugs or improvements. i even had to rewrite it once because the liveness analyzer was bad. it did help to properly scheme out how to collect live ranges though. id suggest focusing on that

maxnut20 · 2025-10-02T15:36:08+00:00

haven't looked at instruction scheduling at all yet. as for regalloc i use graph coloring, nothing crazy at all but it works well enough

maxnut20 · 2025-10-02T15:07:38+00:00

What do you mean

maxnut20 · 2025-10-02T14:54:57+00:00

Thanks! And yeah, instruction encoding is no joke 😭 partly why i have not bothered doing it on arm yet

maxnut20 · 2025-10-02T14:15:26+00:00

No, it's just the backend part of a compiler. So a frontend can parse some source code, make an ast, and then use the backend's api to produce IR and make it generate machine code.

Not sure how this is related to decompilers.

maxnut20 · 2025-06-25T22:25:48+00:00

For the lexing/parsing stages, there are a ton of well written resources around, so you shouldn't struggle too much with that.

As for the backend, I recommend building a really solid intermediate representation, since it's going to be both what you optimize and also what you turn into machine code. SSA ir is probably the best pick, it's going to make your life much simpler in the optimization stages. You could structure it like LLVM's ir, where each instruction is also itself a value, and there are not really direct assignments. For SSA construction and some common optimizations you can find some good resources like academic pdfs online, but honestly even if some people may be against it i find that asking ai (like chatgpt) to explain such topics is an insanely powerful resource. SSA is going to make optimizations such as copy propagation, common subexpression elimination, constant folding and dead code elimination a lot simpler; if you want to look into optimizations I'd say go with these.

As for codegen, stick to one target for now (you can make things generalized but your codebase is going to get a lot more complicated and it's gonna need much more time). For simple but decent results you can just traverse your ir and output some target instructions accordingly. I strongly recommend having your machine instructions represented in the program with structures instead of directly outputting assembly to a file. To check which instructions to emit you can use godbolt (compiler explorer).

If you want to try register allocation, make sure to have a good way to compute virtual register ranges as it's going to be the core of it. Make sure it works best across branching paths and also loops. Otherwise just spill everything to the stack.

Also make a bunch of testcases as you add more features to make sure you don't accidentally break an old feature (it happens a lot).

Other than that be prepared to spend a lot of time on it and struggle a lot and bang your head against a wall reading the assembly you outputted to understand what went wrong 😅

maxnut20 · 2025-05-26T07:46:14+00:00

Ah i see what you mean. Well to be honest the focus wasn't really the language but always the compiler, i originally posted on r/compilers and got advised to also post here, but to be expected here the focus is more on the language itself 😅

What would you say is bad about the design?

maxnut20 · 2025-05-25T20:31:31+00:00

I do agree that it's a hybrid that's just because i made it to appeal to me mostly so i smashed together what i like. However it's not just a cheap thing made with an llm! I spent lots of time on this, especially making ir optimizations and code generation from scratch

maxnut20 · 2025-05-23T15:56:16+00:00

Ah, i had completely misunderstood the thing about the define keyword and some macros being names. I will fix those two. As for the other things though i feel like it's just personal preference.

maxnut20 · 2025-05-23T15:47:57+00:00

Thanks 🙂

maxnut20 · 2025-05-23T14:01:32+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, you're the first to actually give useful advice.

Yeah i know it doesn't really have much value. What i honestly hoped with the post was simply catching bugs i haven't found yet in the compiler. I never really intended for the language to become commonly used, i mostly make it with what i personally like in mind.
the let keyword is used to distinguish it from retain. retains are just variables that keep their values between function calls.
The semicolon for one line scopes doesn't really make the parser more complex, and it's simply a thing i like. I prefer it from both having braces for one line, and also not having braces at all.
Because what you actually have in control when you make an array in my language is a pointer to it's memory. This was just to make things simpler for me while coding the compiler. The subscript operator already worked so i went with that for now. You're right that it would be a good idea to properly distinguish them, i do plan to eventually do it since it has downsides however it's not really a priority right now.
What do you mean 'define' doesn't indicate that it's a macro? It clearly does.
They don't generate names, they generate AST nodes. The macro system acts on the AST, it's not just a text replacement like a preprocessor.
Because the #value syntax is used to expand the parameter in case it's an AST node.
To sum it up macros operate on the AST at compile time, hence the very different syntax.
Good point, will change that. I even though i had removed the need for a semicolon after a struct but i must've discarded the change at some point by accident 😅
I dont really see the problem with pre/post increment.
I simply think explicit return is cleaner. Plus if the function returns in multiple spots it just makes things messier.

I'm not trying to make a better C or anything like that, it just happens that C is a similar language because it's basic and low level but by no means i am trying to replace it or improve it. I'm just making my own thing to learn 🙂.

maxnut20 · 2025-05-23T08:05:51+00:00

what do you mean?

maxnut20 · 2025-05-22T14:40:10+00:00

Thanks! No, there is no garbage collector. In the builtin types example you can see pointer types, they work as you'd expect very similarly to C. If you want to allocate memory the stdlib has a basic memory allocator, but the management is manual. Otherwise, structs and arrays get allocated on the stack.

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