C-repl is a project mainly written in ..., based on the BSD-3-Clause license.
An "interpeter" for C-code, hacked to compile with GHC 6.10 and Cabal 1.6, et al...
c-repl: a C read-eval-print loop. Copyright (C) 2008 Evan Martin [email protected]
I butchered Setup.lhs, but at least it runs... apart from compiling the C bit. That I compiled manually, and hard-coded the path into Child.hs. -Leif Warner [email protected]
Many programming languages come with a REPL (read-eval-print loop), which allows you to type in code line by line and see what it does. This is quite useful for prototyping, experimentation, and debugging code.
Other programming languages, and especially C, use a "compile-run" model, and don't provide a REPL. Let's fix that.
== Dependencies
Debian/Ubuntu users on recent releases can do something like: sudo apt-get install ghc6 gccxml libghc6-parsec-dev libghc6-mtl-dev libghc6-hunit-dev hexpat and hgdbmi can be fetched and installed from Hackage via the above URLs or via cabal-get, and they depend on sudo apt-get install gdb libexpat1-dev c2hs
If you get an error from c2hs like this: /usr/include/bits/pthreadtypes.h:99: (column 6) [FATAL]
Syntax error! The symbol `;' does not fit here. then you unfortunately need a newer c2hs; the one in Ubuntu Hardy is at least recent enough.
== Building The install procedure hasn't quite been worked out yet. For now you can run c-repl from within the source tree: runhaskell Setup.lhs configure runhaskell Setup.lhs build ./dist/build/c-repl/c-repl
== Usage Type normal lines of C code and hit enter. Trailing semicolons are optional. All variable and function declarations are implicitly global, but can be initialized as if they were locals.
int x = 3 printf("at %p, %d ", &x, x) at 0xb7f4a550, 3 FILE* f = fopen("README", "r")
Bring in more headers by writing #include statements. Library functions that are in scope should be tab-completable at the prompt.
include
op
open open_memstream openat64
open64 openat
open
== How it works The approach is surprisingly simple: for each line of code you enter, we compile a shared object in the background. If the compilation succeeds, the object is loaded into a child process via dlopen(). Parsing of C
gccxml to parse the user's input, and due to the complexity of parsing C the input parser is currently hacky and heuristic.)
== Debugging c-repl currently can take one flag, "-v", which causes it to output the internal code that it's generating. Please include this output with bug reports.
== Credit The original idea is due to Satoru Takabayashi (http://0xcc.net), who was responsible for a prototype implementation and advice on the original version.
vim: set tw=72 :