Aver

Aver is a strongly and statically typed language with support for generics.

Developed during my final year project for King's College London under supervision from Dr Laurence Tratt.

Build

Aver's compiler is written in OCaml which generates bytecode for a VM built using RPython.

A unix system is recommended for compiling and running this project as pypy and rpython have pre-built binaries with support for unix systems.

Compiler

OCaml and Dune

Follow the instructions at [https://ocaml.org/learn/tutorials/up_and_running.html] to set up and install OCaml, opam and Dune which are required to build the compiler for Aver.

VM

Python2 and RPython.

Installing RPython

To use RPython you need the PyPy source which includes the RPython framework. Obtaining the source can be done by cloning the mercurial repository using the following commands:

$ cd <path_to>
$ hg clone https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy
$ export PYPY_SRC=<path_to>/pypy

RPython may require libffi and pkg-config which can be installed via your architecture's package manager e.g.

$ sudo apt install libffi-dev pkg-config

---

Once all frameworks and tools have been installed, run the following commands to configure environment variables to a local file and build the compiler and the non-JIT optimised version of the interpreter:

./configure
make

To build the interpreter with JIT run the following command:

make jit

Install

Install the built binaries to a single directory, bin/, at the root of this project where you'll find the compiler, averc, and bytecode interpreters aver{-nojit}.

make install

Usage

Compile a .av file into bytecode by running the following command:

averc <file>.av

Run a compiled bytecode file using the following command:

Without JIT optimisation:

aver-nojit <file>.avb

With JIT optimisation:

aver <file>.avb