Note

This project is incubating and is not ready to be used for anything.

Table of Contents

• AC
• Why?
• Features
• How to build

AC

"Augmented C" (AC) programming language will be a general purpose language meant to be backward compatible with C.

In this regard, I plan implement a functional C compiler that will be extended afterward. This compiler will emit C code to make it cross-platform.

Why?

Using C is very often frustrating so I'm just planning to create new extension/syntax/construct to get rid of this frustration. Other languages addressing this frustration exist however I'm not satified with their direction.

New language rely on FFI or LLVM to import C projects, however I want AC compiler to compiler C files without external dependencies and without need to create thin a wrapper from AC code.

In the long run, I want to be able to use AC as scripting language and the compiler should be several times faster than a standard C compiler. Some design choice as already been made around this (the preprocessor is done during parsing time, no need to run it beforehand) and future design choice will follow,

Features

Currently missing

Since the project is in a very early stage, almost all features (C or AC) are currently missing.

You can check to TODO list to see what has been implemented already.

Planned

• Comprehensive preprocessor. GCC, MSVC and clang generate the most correct preprocessor output, but all other compilers I tried were generating incorrect output for some tests. I will create a pages to compare all the well known compilers.
• Basic type alias such as:
  • i8 i16 i32 i64 i128 for signed integer.
  • u8 u16 u32 u64 u128 for unsigned integer.
  • f32 f64 for floating point numbers.
• Nested procedures and types.
• dot operator as dereference operator. a->b should be equivalent to a.b.
• ptr(int) a = NULL; will be an alias for int *a = NULL.
• arr(int, 10) a; will be an alias for int a[10];.
• All built-in operators or directives will be prefixed with @ such as:
  • @sizeof
  • @typeof
  • struct @align(4) @no_padding vector3 { ... } Besides standard keywords all compile-time operators will be prefixed with @ (they can still be replaced with C macros).
• Alternative function declaration
• Generic functions
• Generic types
• Conditional access
• Concise if branches
• Underscores in number literals.
• Identifier literal.
  • int @"Hello World" = 1;
• Constants declaration.
  • PI @= 3.14f;
• User-defined for loops. (@TODO)
• Everything initialized with zero, unless explicit uninitialization.
• Compile-time evaluation via bytecode + VM.

Unsupported features

Deprecated (and some optional) features in most recent C versions will likely never be implemented.

Examples:

• VLA
• (K&R) function style
• Implicit int return

Not planned

• No exceptions.
• No package manager.
• No built-in slice type. They will likely be implemented in a standard library.
• No slice operator.
• No compilte-time reflection.
• No run-time reflection.

How to build

CB build system which consist of a c library to build c programs.

On Windows (MSVC)

cl.exe cb.c
./cb.exe

On Linux (or POSIX compatible)

cc cb.c -o cb
./cb