Little-CC
I decided to write a self-hosting compiler. Since I was in 15-122 at Carnegie Mellon (which is taught in C), and since C fits in that sweet spot in the intersection of possible to write code in and possible to compile, I decided to write it in C. (Alternatively, some might say that C sits in the sweet spot of unwritable and unreadable, in which case I doomed myself to failure.)
I was inspired by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken's fantastic The Elements of Computing Systems, which takes you all the way from a NAND gate to programming Tetris and includes four chapters on simple compilers, and Jack Crenshaw's Let's Build a Compiler series, partially building a Pascal self-compiler using the KISS principle.
I chose the smallest subset of C that I wouldn't go crazy writing in. I mean, could you imagine writing a compiler without structs or typing?
The compiler comes in three units, as is typical: a tokenizer, a parser, and a code generator. The tokenizer produces a stream of tokens. The parser parses this stream into an internal AST representation, which the code generator then walks down to directly produce x86-64 assembler, leading to correct but inefficient code.
Everything works on 64-bit Mac OS X, but I'm not sure how the C calling conventions change across operating systems and machines. At least on my computer, I can call out to libc, etc.
