mC Compiler

About

This project was a university team project, completed in collaboration with Raoul Shikora. We wrote a compiler from "mini-C" to assembly, the specification (which was provided by the university) can be found in docs/specification.md.

Prerequisites

• Meson in version 0.47.0 or higher (you may want to install it via pip3 install --user meson)
• Ninja
• time, typically located at /usr/bin/time, do not confuse this with the Bash built-in
• flex for generating the lexer
• bison for generating the parser
• A compiler supporting C11 — typically GCC or Clang
• glibc version 2.20 or higher
• For execution of mcc, gcc multi-lib support must be available for the compiler backend.

Build Instructions

First, generate the build directory.

$ meson builddir
$ cd builddir

Meson creates Ninja build files. Let's build.

$ ninja

Unit tests can be run directly with Ninja (or Meson).

$ ninja test

For integration testing we try to compile mC programs and compare their output for a given input.

$ ../scripts/run_integration_tests

For simple integration testing of the generated assembly code, we compile mC programs and check if their return values match the expected values:

$ ../scripts/run_asm_test.sh

Usage

Use the generated mcc app to compile mC-programs as follows:

$ ./mcc test.mc

On successful compilation mcc will generate an executable from test.mc named a.out, execute it like this:

$ ./a.out

See mcc -h for more info about command line arguments. For intermediate stages of the compilation pipeline printers are provided, see development notes for more details.

Known Issues

Compiler warning

Since the unit test matches any grammar rule, there are 5 reduce/reduce-conflicts. These will however not arise, when the testing mode isn't specified, because the parser can only match the unit-test grammar rule when a dedicated variable is set (which can only happen when the function is called via the library API, not when parsing input from mcc).