An informal guide to reading and working on the rustc compiler.
==================================================================
First off, know that our current state of development is "bootstrapping";
this means we've got two compilers on the go and one of them is being used
to develop the other. Rustboot is written in ocaml and rustc in rust. The
one you *probably* ought to be working on at present is rustc. Rustboot is
more for historical comparison and bug-fixing whenever necessary to un-block
development of rustc.
There's a document similar to this next door, then, in boot/README. The boot
directory is where we do work on rustboot.
If you wish to expand on this document, or have one of the
slightly-more-familiar authors add anything else to it, please get in touch or
file a bug. Your concerns are probably the same as someone else's.
High-level concepts
===================
Rustc consists of the following subdirectories:
front/ - front-end: lexer, parser, AST.
middle/ - middle-end: resolving, typechecking, translating
driver/ - command-line processing, main() entrypoint
util/ - ubiquitous types and helper functions
lib/ - bindings to LLVM
The entry-point for the compiler is main() in driver/rustc.rs, and this file
sequences the various parts together.
The 3 central data structures:
------------------------------
#1: front/ast.rs defines the AST. The AST is treated as immutable after
parsing despite containing some mutable types (hashtables and such).
There are three interesting details to know about this structure:
- Many -- though not all -- nodes within this data structure are wrapped
in the type spanned[T], meaning that the front-end has marked the
input coordinates of that node. The member .node is the data itself,
the member .span is the input location (file, line, column; both low
and high).
- Many other nodes within this data structure carry a def_id. These
nodes represent the 'target' of some name reference elsewhere in the
tree. When the AST is resolved, by middle/resolve.rs, all names wind
up acquiring a def that they point to. So anything that can be
pointed-to by a name winds up with a def_id.
- Many nodes carry an additional type 'ann', for annotations. These
nodes are those that later stages of the middle-end add information
to, augmenting the basic structure of the tree. Currently that
includes the calculated type of any node that has a type; it will also
likely include typestates, layers and effects, when such things are
calculated.
#2: middle/ty.rs defines the datatype ty.t, with its central member ty.struct.
This is the type that represents types after they have been resolved and
normalized by the middle-end. The typeck phase converts every ast type to
a ty.t, and the latter is used to drive later phases of compilation. Most
variants in the ast.ty tag have a corresponding variant in the ty.struct
tag.
#3: lib/llvm.rs defines the exported types ValueRef, TypeRef, BasicBlockRef,
and several others. Each of these is an opaque pointer to an LLVM type,
manipulated through the lib.llvm interface.
Control and information flow within the compiler:
-------------------------------------------------
- main() in driver/rustc.rs assumes control on startup. Options are parsed,
platform is detected, etc.
- front/parser.rs is driven over the input files.
- Multiple middle-end passes (middle/resolve.rs, middle/typeck.rs) are run
over the resulting AST. Each pass produces a new AST with some number of
annotations or modifications.
- Finally middle/trans.rs is applied to the AST, which performs a
type-directed translation to LLVM-ese. When it's finished synthesizing LLVM
values, rustc asks LLVM to write them out as a bitcode file, on which you
can run the normal LLVM pipeline (opt, llc, as) to get an executable.
Comparison with rustboot
========================
Rustc is written in a more "functional" style than rustboot; each rustc pass
tends to depend only on the AST it's given as input, which it does not mutate.
Calculations flow from one phase to another by repeatedly rebuilding the AST
with additional annotations.
Rustboot normalizes to a statement-centric AST. Rustc uses an
expression-centric AST.
Rustboot generates 3-address IL into imperative buffers of coded IL quads.
Rustc generates LLVM, an SSA-based expression IL.
Rustc, being attached to LLVM, generates much better code. Factor of 5
smaller, usually. Sometimes much more.
Rustc preserves more of the parsed input structure. Rustboot "desugars" most
of the input, rendering round-trip pretty-printing impossible. Error reporting
is also better in rustc, as type names (as denoted by the user) are preserved
throughout typechecking.
Rustc is not concerned with the PIC-ness of the resulting code, nor anything
to do with encoding DWARF or x86 instructions. All this superfluous
machine-level logic that seeped up to the translation layer in rustboot is
pushed past LLVM into later stages of the toolchain in rustc.
Numerous "bad idea" idiosyncracies of the rustboot AST have been eliminated in
rustc. In general the code is much more obvious, minimal and straightforward.
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