tan programming language

Work In Progress

tan has been my hobby project for several years now. It helped me tremendously on understanding how compilers work, how large-scale software is structured (I read a lot of LLVM source code LOL), and how programming languages are designed. It will become a playground for me to work on interesting language designs. Needless to say, the design is never intended to be "better than xxx language".

I currently want it to:

• Adapt some modern syntax
• Support writing less painful and verbose OOP
• Have strong and interesting meta-programming mechanism
• Steal design from other languages such as Zig, Rust, Carbon, Python, C#, D, ...

Quickstart

A Quick Peek

See *.tan files under test/test_exec for some examples.

Prerequisites

• Make sure to clone this repository using git clone --recursive, see submodules under dep/
• CMake >=3.19
• LLVM 15 tools and development libraries
• See Dockerfile for a full list of dependencies

Building and Testing

tan uses CMake as its build system. Run the following command in project root directory to build and run all tests.

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make tests

Platforms

Platform	Status	Note
Linux	✔️	Only tested on Ubuntu 20.04 for now
Windows	❗	Build successfully, but clang doesn't run correctly on my machine
Mac	❌	I don't have a mac. Mac is for superior people

CMake options

• ENABLE_COVERAGE: bool, Enable test coverage, default OFF
• BUILD_EXAMPLES: bool, Build tan examples, default OFF
• ENABLE_CCACHE: bool, Enable ccache to speed up rebuilding, default ON
• LLVM_ROOT_DIR: Custom LLVM location
• CLANG_ROOT_DIR: Custom CLANG location
• LLD_ROOT_DIR: Custom CLANG location

Documentation

Doxygen	https://tjysdsg.github.io/tan/html/index.html
Some markdown files in the source code	Search under src

Project Structure

• dep: third-party dependencies
• docs: documentations generated by Doxygen
• examples: example programs written in tan and C
• fuzzing: tools for fuzz testing, not updated for a long time
• include: public headers
• runtime: tan runtime source files (a mix of tan and C++)
• scripts: utility scripts
• src: source files
  • analysis: code analysis and type checking
  • ast: Abstract Syntax Tree
  • backtrace: wrapper around libbacktrace
  • base: should be named core loll
  • cli: commandline interface of tanc compiler
  • codegen: LLVM IR and binary object generation
  • compiler: compiler driver
  • lexer: lexer
  • linker: linker implemented using clang frontend
  • llvm_api: API wrappers for LLVM and clang
  • parser: A hand-written parser
  • source_file: Classes related to representing source files and text tokens
• test: unittests and system tests (mostly system tests)
  • test_exec: executable compilation tests
  • test_lib: library compilation tests
  • Some other unittests