The Tiny Compiler is a "by the book" compiler which compiles a small C-like language (called Tiny) to Java Virtual Machine assembler.
In 2003, back when I was a CS student at university I followed a Compilers course. To this day, I still consider it one of the most fascinating topics in computer science.
This repo contains my project assignment for the course. The objective: compile a C-like language to JVM bytecode. I share it here in the hope others may find it useful. Keep in mind this was a student project. Learn from it what you can (in case you are curious, I got the maximum score for the course 😉)
The compiler architecture is built using an object-oriented architecture with extensive use of the visitor design pattern to process the datastructures representing source code and IR code. It follows a traditional compiler pipeline (lexing, parsing, name resolution and typechecking, IR code generation and optimization, target code generation and optimization).
The compiler is written in C++ and was tested and compiled using gcc v3.1 (remember, this project was written in 2003).
- Static typechecking
- Liveness analysis (detect unused variables, use before initialize)
- Control flow analysis (detect dead code, missing return statements)
- Constant folding
- IR based on three address code (static single assignment form)
- IR optimization pass based on DAG representation (reduces temporary registers, common subexpression elimination)
- Code generation to JVM bytecode, register machine to stack machine translation
- Peephole optimization
Detailed descriptions of optimizations and the generated code are explained in this document.
A simple make command will build the tiny compiler.
To compile a file using the tiny compiler, e.g. factorial.tiny:
./tinyc.sh factorial < factorial.tiny
This generates a Java .class file.