Writing Your Own Toy Compiler Using Flex, Bison and LLVM

Isn’t that pretty cool? I’ll admit it’s probably less satisfying to get something running when you just copy paste from a how to guide, but getting this running should still be interesting for you. Plus, and this is the best part, this isn’t the end of the guide, it’s just the beginning, because this is the part where you start tacking on crazy features to this lexer, parser and assembler to create a language that you can call your own. You have all the building blocks, and you should have a basic idea of how to continue on.

The code, by the way, is available on Github here. I avoided saying this because the code was not the point of the article, but rather going over the code in detail was. If you’re just going to grab the code it sort of defeats the purpose of writing your own compiler.

I realize this is a huge article, and there are probably mistakes, so if you run into problems, feel free to send me an email and I’ll make adjustments. If you want to share some info, feel free to do that as well.