The APEX APL Compiler HAS BEEN MOVED!!!!!

APEX is now at [email protected]/bernecky/apex.git

ALL OF THIS CODE IS VERY OBSOLETE, SO GET THEE HENCE.

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APEX compiles a subset of Dyalog APL into one of several languages, currently SISAL, SaC, and D.

Get Started

To generate the compiler from github, clone the repository, say into directory apexgit. When cloning this repo, remember to also load the git submodules using either git submodule update --init, or when cloning for the first time git clone --recursive ...

After that, you can load APEX in Dyalog:

    cd apexgit
    ⍝ Start Dyalog APL V18.0 (or newer), downloadable from www.dyalog.com, and then
    )load wss/apex.dws

At this point, you should have a copy of the apex workspace, which you can try out. The Ancillary/benchmks folder contains subfolders of benchmarks and unit tests, including benchmksAPL, DynamicProgramming, MatrixProducts, benchmksPerf, DeepLearning, Geophysics, UnitTests. Others are on their way. To compile the APL code (*.aplf files) to SaC, do this:

    bm←benchmks.benchmks'Ancillary/MatrixProducts'
    z←⍪apex¨bm
    z ⍝ Names of generated SaC source code files

Rarely, you will need a left argument to apex. If specified, the left argument to the apex verb is a set of space-delimited compiler options, e.g. 'option0=x option1=y...'

Default options are: targetlanguage=sac trace=0 This disables debug tracing during compilation, and tells the compiler to generate SaC code as its output.

The right argument is a folder name, containing the APL code to be compiled, as a set of *.aplf files, each containing the source code for one defined function, e.g., in Ancillary/benchmks/benchmksAPL/iotan, we have:

The verb main.aplf is:

    r←main;⎕IO;⎕RL;n;⎕PP;⎕PW
    ⎕IO←0
    n←100000000
    ⎕RL←16807
    ⎕PP←16
    ⎕PW←80
    r←iotan n
    ⎕←r
    ⎕←r←(r≡(n×n+1.5-0.5)÷2)-1

This sets some global variables, most of which are not used in common applications, invokes iotan with the problem size, n, then compares the result to what is should be, using Gauss' insight.

The verb iotan.aplf is:

    r←iotan n
    r←+/(1.5-0.5)+⍳n

It would have been written as a Dfn in this form, but Dfns had not been invented when the benchmark was written:

    iotan←{ r←+/(1.5-0.5)+⍳⍵}

The funny business with the real numbers is a sloppy way to force the result to 64-bit IEEE floating point.

The apex compiler's output is a pair of SaC source code files in the argument folder, Ancillary/benchmks/benchmksAPL/iotan/src. The iotan.sac file will generate a SaC module (Shared library, .so, .dll) that can be called from Dyalog APL via ⎕na, or from an executable SaC program, e.g, iotan.unittest.sac:

   cd src
   sac2c iotan.sac
   sac2c iotan.unittest.sac

Alternately, an entire set of tests can be compiled this way, using, e.g., 7 tasks:

   cd Ancillary/benchmks/benchmksAPL
   mkdir build
   cd build
   cmake ..
   make -j 7

When compiled with sac2c (from www.sac-home.org), the resulting binary, when executed, will compute the sum of the first n non-negative integers. The result (r) of executing main should be 0 if the result is correct, and 0 otherwise.

You can use ctest to run all tests automatically:

   ctest -j 7