JPL also known as J(ohn Regehr) P((avel Pachenkha) L(ang), or J(ust a) P(rogramming) L(anguage), or whatever else you make fit with the letters JPL is a toy programming language to teach the students of the University of Utah about compilers.
It is an array-based programming language built to process images and videos. To find the entire spec, take a look at SPEC.md
It was initially written with a NASM backend that one would have to assemble with nasm, and link to the runtime. The runtime is minimal. It is written in C, and uses LibPNG to do the image processing. Due to constraints of the class video processing was never finished.
As a compiler it is pretty simple. It will lex, parse, then do source to source optimizations, emitting NASM at the end of the process. We were tasked with choosing from a list of optimizations, so I implemented dead code elimination, constant propagation, constant folding, and a few peephole optimizations.
All tests were run using Perl, and used our required S-Expression outputs were delt with by Racket to guarantee our lexing, parsing, type checking, and optimizations were all correct.
Since the spec is pretty bare, and missing some "real programming language" features, I've added some new features.
First NASM sucks pretty bad, and there were a lot of steps to get a binary working correctly. Now I've added a LLVM backend to make things more portable, and I've got the build step down to two commands. One to compile the object file, and one to link LibPNG.
To compile the compiler, run make compile and you should get a jpl binary outputted in your directory. You may need to
have Tiny Go's llvm-go installed so that LLVM can be invoked while compiling