This is going to be a weekly blog post about the status of simplexhc, an STG to LLVM compiler. Read more about this in the introduction blog post

This week has been mostly about spring-cleaning, and getting things in shape.

Integrating optparse-applicative

I used to have a shabby parsing system for command line options. This got unweildy, so I’m now switching to optparse-applicative, a really neat library for encoding command line options.

Moving from pretty to prettyprinter

prettyprinter is the new kid on the block when it comes to pretty-printing libraries. It’s really well written, has a ton of examples to boot, and has clean documentation.

I switched from pretty to prettyprinter, because I had shoe-horned prettyprinter like features into pretty.

Simplifying usage of llvm-hs-pure

llvm-hs-pure does not support a monadic interface for building up the IR. For some applications, a monadic API is way easier, and IR building is one of them, IMO. So, I stole some code from a side project of mine, tiny-optimising-compiler that offers an IR builder interface. I’ll need to extend it to generate LLVM, but this was something I needed to do in any case for the other project as well.

Gathering all binds in the STG program

To create a giant switch case of all possible bindings, I first need to gather these up. I currently have a Builder that maintains this context. I’m not sure if this is the cleanest way to do this, but I just want some code to compile at this point that I’m desperate.

Now that I have the infrastructure stuff somewhat out of the way, I hope to get more “actual” code written this week. Goal for this week: get the simplest STG program to compile :).

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