Tiny-C Compiler

A compiler of the Tiny C language, and of future expansions to it

How to run it

Tools

You need to have rustc, the Rust compiler, and cargo, its package manager. For that, go to the Rustup website and follow the instructions.

Rustup will help you install both rustc, cargo, keeping them up-to-date and using different versions, if you would need to.

Both for ease of use, and because I might end up using the nightly toolchain (there are certain functions that are on nightly only but are useful!), I'd 101% recommend using rustup :)

Running the project

First, build the project.

cargo build

Then, run it feeding it some code:

cargo run -- -v parse code_samples/do_while_example.tc
cargo run -- -v add-symbols code_samples/function_call.tc
cargo run -- -v semantic-analysis code_samples/math_functions.tc

You can also check the included usage help:

cargo run -- --help

Running the tests

To run the unit tests:

cargo test

There is a fuzzing test, but it's marked as #ignore because it takes a few minutes to run. In order to run it, do this:

cargo test --release -- --ignored --nocapture

The fuzzing test creates random, gramatically valid input, and feeds it into the parser, looking for potential panics. If the parser doesn't panic, then it knows how to handle all input it's given. We build up gramatically valid input, because we want to fuzz the AST building process (which I wrote), and not the parsing process itself (which I derived from the Pest library).

The --release option makes it so that the test runs in an optimized build, and runs therefore as fast as it can go. The --nocapture option will ensure that we get a proper fuzzing report after the test is run.

The fuzzer will currently run 5 million random examples. In order to change this number, go to line 292 on fuzzer.rs, and edit this variable:

let num_iterations = 5_000_000;

Syntax Highlighting

You can have syntax highlighting for Tiny-C on your editor of choice (if, by choice, you mean VSCode or Sublime Text!).

It's pretty nice. Instructions are available here.