This guide aims to document basic workflows for developing the Roland compiler.
In order to build the compiler, you will need the standard rust toolchain. In order to run tests and run other scripts associated with this project, you will need just.¹
For the native backend to work, you will need qbe installed. For running tests using the WASM backend, you will need wasmtime installed.
All commands that follow in this document are intended to be run in the root directory of this project. That is, the same directory containing this file.
¹It is possible to get away without having just installed - you can look in the justfile to see what commands just would be running, and run them yourself.
TODO
wasmtime may be available from your distro's package manager. Failing that, check out the wasmtime documentation.
just test_amd64
This command will automatically build the compiler if necessary, and run all tests using the QBE linux-amd64 backend.
Test artifacts will be cleaned up automatically for passing tests. Artifacts for faiiling tests (such as .s and .ssa files) will stick around for inspection.
just baseline
...(change rolandc, qbe, etc.)...
just test-all-preserve-artifacts
The first command runs all tests, saving artifacts into the folder tests_baseline. The second runs all tests again, saving artifacts into the normal tests folder.
Then, use your favorite folder diff tool to see what changed in the generated code.
By default, the roland compiler will look for QBE on the system PATH. If you are working on QBE and want to test your changes without overriding the system installation of QBE, you can place your binary in target/release/ and the roland compiler should automatically pick it up and use it instead.