Tree @0.15 (Download .tar.gz)
SixtyPical
Version 0.15. Work-in-progress, everything is subject to change.
SixtyPical is a 6502-like programming language with advanced static analysis.
"6502-like" means that it has similar restrictions as programming in 6502 assembly (e.g. the programmer must choose the registers that values will be stored in) and is concomitantly easy for a compiler to translate it to 6502 machine language code.
"Advanced static analysis" includes abstract interpretation, where we go through the program step by step, tracking not just the changes that happen during a specific execution of the program, but sets of changes that could possibly happen in any run of the program. This lets us determine that certain things can never happen, which we can then formulate as safety checks.
In practice, this means it catches things like
- you forgot to clear carry before adding something to the accumulator
- a subroutine that you call trashes a register you thought was preserved
- you tried to read or write a byte beyond the end of a byte array
- you tried to write the address of something that was not a routine, to a jump vector
and suchlike. It also provides some convenient operations based on machine-language programming idioms, such as
- copying values from one register to another (via a third register when there are no underlying instructions that directly support it); this includes 16-bit values, which are copied in two steps
- explicit tail calls
- indirect subroutine calls
The reference implementation can analyze and compile SixtyPical programs to 6502 machine code.
Quick Start
If you have the VICE emulator installed, from this directory, you can run
./loadngo.sh c64 eg/c64/hearts.60p
and it will compile the hearts.60p source code and
automatically start it in the x64
emulator, and you should see:
You can try the loadngo.sh
script on other sources in the eg
directory
tree, which contains more extensive examples, including an entire
game(-like program); see eg/README.md for a listing.
Documentation
- Design Goals
- SixtyPical specification
- SixtyPical revision history
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical syntax
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical analysis
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical compilation
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical fallthru optimization
- 6502 Opcodes used/not used in SixtyPical
TODO
Save registers on stack
This preserves them, so that, semantically, they can be used later even though they are trashed inside the block.
And at some point...
low
andhigh
address operators - to turnword
type intobyte
.- Tests, and implementation, ensuring a routine can be assigned to a vector of "wider" type
- Related: can we simply view a (small) part of a buffer as a byte table? If not, why not?
- Related: add constant to buffer to get new buffer. (Or to table, but... well, maybe.)
- Check that the buffer being read or written to through pointer, appears in appropriate inputs or outputs set. (Associate each pointer with the buffer it points into.)
static
pointers -- currently not possible because pointers must be zero-page, thus@
, thus uninitialized.- Question the value of the "consistent initialization" principle for
if
statement analysis. interrupt
routines -- to indicate that "the supervisor" has stored values on the stack, so we can trash them.- Add absolute addressing in shl/shr, absolute-indexed for add, sub, etc.
- Automatic tail-call optimization (could be tricky, w/constraints?)
- Possibly
ld x, [ptr] + y
, possiblyst x, [ptr] + y
. - Maybe even
copy [ptra] + y, [ptrb] + y
, which can be compiled to indirect LDA then indirect STA! - Optimize
or|and|eor a, z
to zero-page operations if address of z < 256.
Commit History
@0.15
git clone https://git.catseye.tc/SixtyPical/
- Merge pull request #11 from catseye/develop-0.15 Chris Pressey (commit: GitHub) 6 years ago
- Add more test cases. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- 1-line bugfix. Now the optimizer does do the expected good job. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Add more tests. Apparently our algorithm does not do a good job. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Rebuild Ribos 2. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Rebuild "The PETulant Cursor". Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Optimize away `RTS` and `JMP` when possible. Fallthru stuff done. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Begin hooking the fallthru analysis up to the compilation phase. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Vastly simplify the fallthru analysis algorithm. Chris Pressey 6 years ago
- Serialize main first. However, this could use a fresh approach. Chris Pressey 6 years ago