Fuzion Toolchain Modules

This page describes the internal design of the Fuzion Toolchain with its modules (Java packages) and their inter-dependencies.

Modules

The following modules should exist:

• dev.flang.util contains utilities used by most other modules.
• dev.flang.ast the abstract syntax tree.
• dev.flang.parser the parser, depends on ast, since it constructs the original AST of the front end.
• dev.flang.fe the front end, depends on ast and mir since it transforms the abstract syntax tree into the module IR.
• dev.flang.ir the abstract intermediate representation, provides common infrastructure for mir, air and fuir.
• dev.flang.mir the module intermediate representation, based on ir, created by fe, taken as input by me.
• dev.flang.me the middle end, creates air from mir.
• dev.flang.air the application intermediate representation, based on ir, created by me, taken as input by opt.
• dev.flang.opt the optimizer, creates fuir from air, uses backend dev.flang.be.interpreter for compile time constant evaluation.
• dev.flang.fuir the fuzion intermediate representation, based on ir, created by opt, taken as input by be.*.
• dev.flang.be.* the back ends, create platform dependent binaries from fuir.
• dev.flang.tools the command line tools, depends on parser, fe, me, opt and be.

An important aspects of this architecture is that later phases are fully separated from earlier ones:

• the middle end is independent of parsing and any syntactic sugar that was removed by the front end
• the optimizer is independent of aspects removed by the middle end such as generics in addition to the parsing and syntactic sugar processed by the front end.
• the back end is independent of aspects removed by the optimizer such as inheritance calls, dynamic binding, match expression, etc. in addition to front end and middle end details.