About

Design Philosophy and Limitations

  • Mewa is not a framework. It is not instrumented with configuration or plug-ins. The program logic is entirely implemented by the compiler front-end author in Lua. In other words: You write the compiler front-end with Lua using Mewa and not with Mewa using Lua as binding language.
  • Mewa is not optimized for collaborative work, unlike many other compiler front-ends.
  • Mewa provides no support for the evaluation of different paths of code generation. The idea is to do a one-to-one mapping of program structures to code and leave all analytical optimization steps to the backend.

Status

I consider the software as ready for use in projects.

Example

As proof of concept, I have implemented a compiler for a general-purpose, statically typed programming language with the following features:

  • Structures (plain data structures without methods, implicitly defined assignment operator)
  • Interfaces
  • Classes (custom defined constructors, destructors, operators, methods, inheritance of classes and interfaces)
  • Free procedures and functions
  • Polymorphism through interface inheritance
  • Generic programming (generic classes and functions)
  • Lambdas as arguments of generic classes or functions
  • Exception handling with a fixed exception structure (an error code and an optional string)

The example language1 is built and run through some tests if you make test after the build.

Portability

Build

GNU Makefile support.

Hardware

The tests currently use an LLVM IR target template file for the following platforms:

  • Linux x86_64 (Intel 64 bit)
  • Linux i686 (Intel 32 bit)

Contributions for other platforms and build systems are appreciated and welcome.