A compiler for the esoteric programming language
Duck Duck Goose
written in Rust. Currently only supports Linux x86-64.
Uses gcc to assemble the generated x86-64 code.
Build the project with cargo:
cargo build --release
This will produce ./target/release/gdd.
gdd takes a single argument specifying the path to the .ddg file.
./target/release/gdd ./examples/helloworld.ddg
This will produce a helloworld binary in the current directory.
./helloworld
Alternatively, cargo run ./examples/helloworld.ddg will do the same thing.
This project was mostly an excuse to practice writing Rust (also I am not experienced in compiler design). The actual Duck Duck Goose (DDG) language is fairly easy to parse. Determining operations and operands simply involves counting ducks. However, the rotational aspect of the language makes things slightly more complicated.
My first approach to this was
to statically calculate the rotated duck positions
based on the adjustments made to the goose
over the program's instructions
(parse::_apply_goose_update()) and dedicate
registers to hold specific duck values. While this would
work for a program with no control flow like helloworld.ddg,
it would quickly derail in the presence of loops. Additionally,
by dedicating registers, the number of ducks a program
could utilize was limited by register count.
Adding a layer of indirection and allocating the ducks on the stack resolved the issues with the first approach, but doing so does bring about overhead by needing to calculate duck indexes for each operation to load from. Additionally, most of the written logic for this approach is architecture specific (x86-64) which limits portability.