Thomas Castleman's website.
In April 2021 I wanted to try teaching some of the ideas and techniques I had learned from taking a course on compilers. My goal was to create a reasonable compiler project that would put the focus on generating code, as opposed to a particular architecture.
The result is this repository, which contains support code as well as a demo implementation of a compiler for a basic source language targeting a made-up architecture of my own design. I used this to teach my dad about the basics of compilers.
The project is implemented entirely in Python, as this was a language my dad was familiar with.
The README documentation is actually pretty thorough, so I won't say much here, but the source language processed by the compiler is a small language capable of simple arithmetic, conditionals, variables, and functions.
As an example, here is a function that computes Fibonacci numbers:
; computes the nth fibonacci number (0-indexed)
(def (fib n)
(if (= n 0)
1
(if (= n 1)
1
(+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2))))))
The target for the compiler is an assembly language dubbed rasm, for Randy's (my dad) assembly. It supports basic arithmetic, comparisons, jumps, and call/return instructions.
The architecture which implements this instruction set is made-up as well, and is implemented as a virtual machine. The machine has three registers (an "answer" register, a stack pointer register, and a instruction pointer register), two flags (one indicating equality, the other the "less than" relationship between compared operands), and a stack with 10,000 locations.
I recommend reading the code in the /rasm directory if you are interested in
the assembly language / virtual machine.