Lisp Compiler Progress • Live Lisp Hacking

Last week I detailed my plans for creating a compiler toolchain for a new Lisp called Mesche. Today I'll show some early progress on it and explain a bit of what I had to do to get this far!

You can check out the code on Sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/~mesche/compiler

• Linker
• Assembler
• Basic program execution

• Understanding the ELF format and generating it correctly
• x86 instruction encoding

401000:	b8 01 00 00 00       	mov    $0x1,%eax
401005:	48 8b 1c 25 00 20 40 	mov    0x402000,%rbx

• Encoding (and decoding) more instructions
• Detecting instructions that use memory addresses, updating them
• Writing functions in assembly and calling them

• x86 Opcode Reference (coder64-abc, geek64-abc)
• x86-64 Instruction Encoding on osdev.org Wiki
• x86-64 SysV ABI Reference
• ELF-64 Object File Format Reference
• Understanding Intel Instruction Sizes (doesn't mention 64-bit though)

Let's hack on a Lisp project! To make things interesting, I'll let you choose:

• Gemini Exporter for Org Mode
• Mesche Compiler
• Music Player in Guile Scheme

Cast your vote here: https://fast-poll.com/poll/1387af43

We ended up working on the Gemini exporter, you can find the code here:

https://git.sr.ht/~daviwil/ox-gemini-clean