Makeshift is a programming language that was designed to bootstrap the Ashet Home Computer. It is meant to run on 16 bit machines and is currently implemented with that restriction.

Check out some example source:

const text = { 48, 48, 55, 0 };

fn strlen(ptr) {
  var len = 0;
  while(ptr@(len)) {
    len = len + 1;
  }
  return len;
}

fn main() {
  return strlen(text);
}

• Make a programming language that is suitable for 16 bit machines
• Make a programming language that can be bootstrapped from assembly.
• Don't care too much about type or memory safety
• Well-known syntax constructs (C style)

EXPERIMENTAL

The parser and interpreter for Makeshift is implemented already, but the compiler and (optional) optimizer is still missing.

• Optimize string handling
  • Put strings into global memory instead of stack for temporaries
  • Deduplicate strings
• New feature: Pre-initialized sized memory ("give me 20 bytes")
• SPU 2 Compiler
  • Compile to intermediate modules
    • Modules have export table (symbol name => offset)
    • Modules have import table (offset => symbol name)
  • Allow linking of several modules into one
  • Modules can be hand-written with assembler
  • Link modules together into a final binary
• Expression optimizer
  • Recursively try to replace constant parts in expressions.
    • If a expression is comptime evaluatable, it can be replaced by the equivalent number expression, even when function calls are incorporated (just apply the same rules as for top-level expressions).
  • Deduplication of constants with the same value
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