June 2003
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
8h 40m
English
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Chapter 7. The Intermediate Code Compiler
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. [ . . . ]
Better than he was before. Better . . . stronger . . . faster.
—Oscar Goldman, The Six Million Dollar Man
The Intermediate Code Compiler (IMCC) is an alternate tool for creating and running Parrot bytecode. It has several advantages over the method introduced in the previous chapter. It’s a Parrot assembler and embeds the Parrot runtime engine, so it can compile a PASM file to bytecode and immediately run the bytecode with a single command. IMCC can also perform code optimizations, though it doesn’t by default.
IMCC includes its own language, which is commonly called
Parrot Intermediate
Language (PIR). PIR is an overlay on top of Parrot assembly language
and has many higher-level features, though it still
isn’t a high-level language. Assembly files
containing PIR code end with an
.imc
extension.
Getting Started
The first step to working with IMCC
is to compile it. First, build Parrot following the steps in the
previous chapter. Then, from within the
languages/imcc directory in the
parrot repository, type:
$ make $ make test
It’s likely that by the time you read this, you
won’t have to compile IMCC at all. One of the
planned tasks is to include these steps in Parrot’s
Makefile, so it will be done when you compile
Parrot.
After compiling IMCC, create a file fjords.pasm
in the languages/imcc directory with these two
lines (or reuse the file from Chapter 6):
print "He's pining for the ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.