Hacker News Reader

Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

I really would love to have this compiler have a llvm backend. I like the idea of a small FP language with amazing error messages. Haskell is too big and complex for me.

View on HN

I've briefly looked at LLVM and how to interface with it but back then I didn't find much else than some C++ Builder API. I'd hope for some textual format that I could give to LLVM as an input. I assume it exists and that I've just been googling wrong :) Would definitely appreciate some pointers in that regard.

Other than that my best bet for native binaries is most likely compiling to C or GraalVM (which already exists as an experimental backend in elm-in-elm via Truffle!)

The textual representation is known as the LLVM IR (the reference is at https://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html). My understanding (as purely an amateur enthusiast) is that generally using a higher-level builder, like the ones for C++ or OCaml, is recommended, but that it's entirely possible to generate the IR directly.

As the other comment says, LLVM has a text based IR. But you may also want to look into QBE which is simpler and lighter weight than LLVM but has a similar text interface so you could start with that to get up and running, and then add support for llvm later.

To save anyone else a search:

QBE: Compiler Backend - https://c9x.me/compile/

QBE vs LLVM - https://c9x.me/compile/doc/llvm.html

Compiling down to C is a great idea as well. Nim does that

Roc is trying to fill this space: https://www.roc-lang.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com