This is a small (partly educational for myself, partly a potential example for anyone else picking up these tools) project derived from the Chumsky parser combinator crate's tutorial. Rather than the tutorial's in-Rust interpreter-style implementation, I've modified the code to take the AST from the parser and transfer it to an LLVM backend using Inkwell (which provides a Rust wrapper around LLVM's API).

Running the project

To get an executable:

foo_llvm test.foo

You can also set the -p flag to llvm-ir, assembly, bitcode, or object to get other types of output. llvm-ir, by default, is written to stderr unless an output file is specified.

Producing an executable requires a C compiler or linker: the options the program recognizes are clang, gcc, ld, lld (the LLVM linker), or link (the MSVC linker) -- if none are specified, it will try each.

Note: Some linkers (specifically the MSVC linker) are currently untested.

Building from source

To build this project from source, you must have llvm-config and version 18 of LLVM installed. Ideally, llvm-sys's build script should automatically be able to locate your LLVM installation.

The libffi crate is also listed as a dependency. By default, this builds the libffi library for interfacing with C by itself in order to include it. Per the crate's documentation, if you have libffi installed and would prefer it use that rather than building a new copy, you can change Cargo.toml to specify the system feature:

[dependencies]
...
libffi = { version = "3.2.0", features = ["system"] }

Aside from issues you may (but hopefuly don't) have with linking LLVM or libffi, the project should run with a simple cargo run -- test.foo without any other trouble. I wrote it using Rust 1.82.0.