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Asterix

Asterix (named after the cartoon character) is a low-level programming language with basic integer arithmetic, memory access, functions, and variables, with a syntax that resembles the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) and compiler/parser-generator languages like Yacc. It has syntactic sugar for input parsing and output generation.

The language is implemented as a compiler to amd64 (a.k.a. x86_64) machine code. It was not bootstrapped in C, but using a predecessor called prox2 which is briefly described on the (meta-)compiler project page.

In Asterix, functions and “grammar rules” are the same thing. Its statements and expressions somewhat resemble “semantic actions” from conventional parser generators, but can also specify arbitrary conditions to be “matched”. Control flow is defined by BNF-like sequence, alternation, and repetition forms.

For example, here is a function (used in the Asterix compiler) that looks for an ASCII digit and returns the corresponding numeric value:

digit : c =
    c=[0-9] { c - '0' }
  | c=[A-Z] { c - '7' }
  | c=[a-z] { c - 'W' } ;

It should not be confused with an actual parser generator. There is no reference to any kind of formalism and all code is compiled linearly without optimization or any significant analysis.

Like prox2 and its predecessors, Asterix takes significant inspiration from a compiler-writing language published in 1964 called “META II”.

Asterix is free software (free as in freedom), and may be modified and/or redistributed in accordance with the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 3 or later.

2021-12-07 — 2 small changes:

• Pushed a minor revision of the Asterix compiler which was committed on 2020-07-05 but not published until now.
• The new tarball now also includes binaries, so it is no longer necessary to bootstrap the Asterix compiler before using it; if you do wish to bootstrap it, first remove the binaries or move them somewhere else for comparison; the binaries produced from the bootstrap should be identical, and as usual, the expected sizes and checksums can be found in bootstrap.txt.

Links:

• Git repository: git clone https://pimgooss.home.xs4all.nl/src/asterix/.git asterix
• Tarball (source code plus binaries for asterix, asterix-asm, and elfwrap): asterix-2021-12-07-322f9137.tar.gz (64 kB)
• The “README” file for Asterix
• A full description of the language, with some examples
• An explanation of how to bootstrap Asterix, once you have a checkout of its repository or copy of its source tree

Old versions (tarballs with source code only):

• asterix-2020-05-03-8a1b5b2c.tar.gz (51 kB)
• asterix-2019-08-31-b0396cc7.tar.gz (50 kB)

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