Citrus

Citrus is a simple dynamically typed linear language written in Ruby, Treetop, and LLVM. It is meant to be an example of how to write a basic compiler.

Being linear, it could be called very c-like, but it has been written to have a syntax closer to Ruby. Its current main features are:

Dynamically typed
Extremely ruby-like syntax
Integer, Float, String, Symbol, Boolean, Array, and Range types
Easy integration of C functions into the API

It’s prime examples are in the example directory, but here is an excerpt from factorial.ct:

def factorial(num) if num == 0 fac = 1 else fac = num*factorial(num-1) end return fac end

printf(“factorial(%d): %d”, 6, factorial(6)) As you can see, very ruby-like.

Installing & Requirements

Citrus requires the following libraries:

LLVM 2.9 compiled with shared libraries
- On Mac OS X, the quickest way is to use ‘brew install llvm –shared`
- On Linux, there are usually pre-compiled packages
Ruby
Treetop
Ruby LLVM (currently building the source from Jeremy’s next branch is required)

Everything except LLVM (and presently, ruby-llvm) is installed when running ‘gem install citrus-compiler`

Running

Citrus is a pretty simple thing to run:

$ ruby bin/citrus [options] FILENAME -O Doesn’t run optimization -i Dumps bitcode -c NAME Compiles to the given file name -h Prints help If citrus is run without -c it JIT complies the code, running it in place.

Problems & Todos

Hashs
Create a standard library
Better dynamically typed arrays (using structures)
Better exception handling (currently only works semi-effectively within begin blocks)
Garbage Collection