flukiluke / L-BASIC

The L-BASIC compiler and interpreter

The L-BASIC programming language

As you may imagine, this is a BASIC compiler. The language variant is reasonably close to QB64 but we're willing to break compatibility with programs from 1985 when needed.

Building

Building L-BASIC is more complex than a regular QB64 program, particularly because of the need to link against LLVM. Also, neither the L-BASIC source tree or any prerequisites can be installed in a path containing spaces - this is a limitation of make. L-BASIC itself can handle paths with spaces though.

Windows

Install prerequisites:

• QB64 (Phoenix edition), version 3.4.1: https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/QB64pe/releases/download/v3.4.1/qb64pe_win-x64-3.4.1.7z [SHA-256: 41ba1d4da734c2c2ac309d923b48a9ccf3afbf936b1d23a3be9a885840a7f95d]
• MSYS2: https://www.msys2.org/
• LLVM-mingw (ucrt edition), version 20220323/14.0.0: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw/releases/download/20220323/llvm-mingw-20220323-ucrt-x86_64.zip [SHA-256: 3014a95e4ec4d5c9d31f52fbd6ff43174a0d9c422c663de7f7be8c2fcc9d837a]

Inside an MSYS environment:

• Install git and make: pacman -S git make
• Extract LLVM-mingw to ~
• Extract QB64 to to ~
• Configure environment:

  export QB64=~/qb64pe/qb64pe.exe
  export LLVM_INSTALL=~/llvm-mingw-20220323-ucrt-x86_64
  export PYTHON=$LLVM_INSTALL/python/bin/python3.exe
  

• Build: ./build.sh

The output binary is out/lbasic.exe. To compile a program:

./out/lbasic.exe -t hello.bas
./hello.exe

Linux

Install prerequisites:

• QB64 (Phoenix edition), version 3.4.1: https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/QB64pe/releases/download/v3.4.1/qb64pe_lnx-3.4.1.tar.gz [SHA-256: a47213e0a2e6d01e2fdf0db53e20dfb86131511230cf242ea7b372c90aa8d553]
• clang, version 14. On apt based systems: sudo apt install clang-14. If your distro doesn't have that version, the LLVM project provides a custom repository: https://apt.llvm.org/
• Configure environment:

  export QB64=~/qb64pe/qb64pe
  

• Build: ./build.sh

The output binary is out/lbasic. To compile a program:

./out/lbasic -t hello.bas
./hello

Build options

These may be set as environment variables before running build.sh:

• QB64: Path to QB64 compiler program
• QBFLAGS: QB64 compilation flags to use
• OUT_DIR: Directory to place final output binaries
• LBASIC_CORE_COMPILER: L-BASIC compiler used to build internal libraries. Defaults to the just-built lbasic in OUT_DIR.
• TOOLS_DIR: Location of the tools source directory
• LLVM_INSTALL: Directory containing the bin and lib folder for the LLVM installation. If empty or set to system, expect programs to be on the PATH.
• CC: C compiler used to build foundation library
• AR: Archiver used to build internal libraries
• CFLAGS: C compiler flags used to build foundation library
• PYTHON: Path to python program used to run python build steps