Quick Start

Compilation

HNC is buildable by both cabal sandbox and stack, on Windows, Linux and MacOS, in 64 or 32 bits.

Stack

stack update
stack setup
stack install
$(stack path --local-bin)/spl-hnc -O hn_tests/euler6.hn

Cabal sandbox

cabal update
cabal sandbox init
cabal install
.cabal-sandbox/bin/spl-hnc -O hn_tests/euler6.hn

Arch Linux

On Arch you can shorten build time by using prebuilt libraries
from ArchHaskell project.

Add 2 ArchHaskell binary repositories (haskell-core and haskell-web) to pacman.conf. Install
the following prebuilt packages from there to avoid building them. GHC comes
as a dependency.

sudo pacman -S cabal-install haskell-{adjunctions,haskell-src-exts,hunit,logict,parsec,quickcheck,safe}

Proceed to the general compilation steps for Cabal sandbox described above

Advanced use

• run tests (spl-test-hunit-exe is the primary suite)
• read wiki
• talk to me at https://gitter.im/nponeccop/HNC
• run our main test suite (dist/build/spl-test-hunit-exe/spl-test-hunit-exe)
• run hnc with either -O or --dump-opt option to see our first attempts at optimization
• follow instructions below to feed generated .cpp files to a C++ compiler
  and linker either directly or by using our extension to Boost.Build.

You’ll need MSVC/GCC, Boost and Boost.Build.

Under the hood

HNC is an open-source cross-platform compiler based on modern technologies: Glasgow Haskell Platform,
UUAGC attribute grammar preprocessor, Parsec parsing library, HOOPL graph optimization library, unification-fd structural unification library. The codebase is tiny: less than 4 KLOC, in the spirit of VPRI Ometa.

State of affairs

Many HN programs can already be compiled into an ugly functional subset of C++ and
then into executables and run (see hn_tests folder for .hn sources and .cpp targets).
A UDP echo server and a few Project Euler problems are the only useful programs so far,
but mostly because we are too lazy to write more examples.

What is done

• Parser
• Type inference using UUAG, including injection of explicit template parameters when C++ doesn’t infer them
• Identifier- and scope-preserving translation from AST into graph IR and back using HOOPL dominator analysis
• An optimizer of the IR using HOOPL (almost; only inlining and dead code elimination)
• Compiler of closures into C++ functors using UUAG (almost)
• C++ pretty printer (almost)
• A Boost.Build plugin to integrate .hn files into C++ projects

Advances as of Mar 8 2017

• Split Parser and Unifier into separate self-contained components
• Joined efforts with https://groupoid.space and https://github.com/ptol/oczor projects
• Working on extracting other components to make HNC a sort of toy compiler construction framework
• Working on loop generation

Advances as of Jul 21 2015

• Fixed almost all optimizer bugs

What is not done

• Proper error reporting
• Assignments
• The instantiator of polymorphic code into monomorphic is not implemented
• Module system, namespace support, HNI implementation and C++ integration in general are rudimentary or missing
• Priorities of C++ infix operators are broken
• RAII should be used with care
• SPL support is almost missing
• Polymorphic constants like “empty list” are not supported

Setting up MSVC and Boost

• Install free Visual C++ Express or non-free Visual Studio
• Download Boost library from boost.org.
• Extract boost subfolder from the distribution. It’s the folder containing header files for all libraries.

Create config.cmd one level above HNC folder, so it’s not under source control:

@set INCLUDE=folder-containing-boost-subfolder
@call "%VS100COMNTOOLS%..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat"

VS100COMNTOOLS is environment variable name set by VC 10.0 installer. Use set | findstr COMN to find
out which version(s) of Visual C you have installed and change the .cmd file accordingly.

run testAll.cmd from hn_tests folder. You should see tmp-*.cpp files being generated
from .hn sources and compiled into .obj files.

Setting up GCC

The generated code is not specific to MSVC or Windows, so any other Boost-compatible C++ compiler
and platform should work too. However, the scripts to run test suite are not there yet.

To run deref1.cpp test manually with GCC, run

gcc -I../cpplib/include test.cpp ../cpplib/lib.cpp -lstdc++ --std=c++0x

from hn_tests folder if Boost headers are installed globally to /usr/include, or

gcc -I../cpplib/include -Ifolder-containing-boost-subfolder test.cpp  ../cpplib/lib.cpp -lstdc++ --std=c++0x

if Boost headers are manually unpacked locally.

License

Distributed under GNU Lesser General Public Licence Version 3.