cat -v harmful stuff

8cc.vin: Pure Vim script C Compiler

This is a Vim script port of 8cc built on ELVM. In other words, this is a complete C compiler written in Vim script.

8cc is a nicely-written small C compiler for x86_64 Linux. It’s C11-aware and self-hosted. ELVM is a Eso Lang Virtual Machine. ELVM customizes 8cc to emit its own intermediate representation, EIR as frontend. ELVM compiles C code into EIR via the frontend. And then translates EIR into various targets (Python, Ruby, C, BrainFxxk, Piet, Befunge, Emacs Lisp, …) in backend. The architecture resembles LLVM. This presentation is a good stuff to know ELVM architecture further (though in Japanese).

ELVM can compile itself into various targets. So I added a new ‘Vim script’ backend and use it to translate C code of 8cc into Vim script.

Now 8cc.vim is written in pure Vim script. 8cc.vim consists of frontend (customized 8cc) and backend (ELC). It can compile C code into Vim script. And of course Vim can evaluate the generated Vim script code.

Note that this is a toy project. 8cc.vim is much much slower. It takes 824 (frontend: 430 + backend: 396) seconds to compile the simplest putchar() program on MacBook Pro Early 2015 (2.7 GHz Intel Core i5). But actually it works!

As VM runs on Vim script, 8cc.vim works on Linux, OS X and (hopefully) Windows.

Read more here.