https://github.com/ekdohibs/camlboot

Experiment on how to bootstrap the OCaml compiler
https://github.com/ekdohibs/camlboot

ocaml

Last synced: 3 months ago
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Experiment on how to bootstrap the OCaml compiler

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/ekdohibs/camlboot
• Owner: Ekdohibs
• License: mit
• Created: 2018-09-23T19:27:51.000Z (over 6 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2022-04-16T10:07:39.000Z (almost 3 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-10-10T22:29:01.608Z (3 months ago)
• Topics: ocaml
• Language: OCaml
• Size: 13.2 MB
• Stars: 95
• Watchers: 8
• Forks: 7
• Open Issues: 4
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

        
# camlboot: An OCaml bootstrap experiment

camlboot is an experiment on the boostraping of the [OCaml](https://ocaml.org/) compiler. It is composed of:

- An interpreter of OCaml, in the directory `interpreter/`, which is able to interpret the OCaml compiler. This interpreter is written in a subset of OCaml called miniml, for which a compiler is available as part of the experiment.

- A compiler for miniml, in the directory `miniml/compiler/`. This compiler compiles miniml to OCaml bytecode, which is then executed by the OCaml runtime. It is written in scheme (more specifically, [guile](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/)), since the goal is to bootstrap OCaml. Note that guile is itself bootstrapped directly from gcc, and building OCaml needs a C compiler as well, so we effectively bootstrap OCaml from gcc.

- A handwritten lexer for the bootstrapping of ocamllex, in the directory `lex/`. This lexer is able to perform the lexing of ocamllex's own `lexer.mll`, the first step towards the bootstrap of ocamllex, and then OCaml.

## Compilation:

After cloning, you first need to clone the `ocaml/` submodule, with `git submodule init && git submodule update --recursive`.

You will also need a C compiler, and `guile`.

Then you can perform `make -j$(nproc) _boot/ocamlc && make -j$(nproc) fullboot`, which will compile a bootstrap compiler, and use it to fully bootstrap OCaml from sources. The resulting bytecode should be bit-for-bit compatible with the one you can get by compiling the code in the `ocaml-src/` submodule with its own bundled bootstrap compiler.

Expect this to take some time: on an 8-core machine, it took about 16 hours of CPU time, and 4 hours of wall-clock time.