README.md

Debugging

If you are trying to debug the code generation part of the compiler (and would like to see which WebAssembly instructions are getting generated) I recommend downloading wabt, the WebAssembly binary toolkit. It contains the command-line tool wasm2wat which can be used like such (assuming you have added the toolkit to your PATH variable):

$ wasm2wat wasm-output/math.wasm

Add the flag --no-check to the end if the generated code does not pass the WebAssembly validation phase but you still want to see what it generated. Add the flag --verbose if you want more detailed information about what the different WebAssembly instructions do (such as the extra parameters on I32Load, CallIndirect, etc.).

Error Handling

We try to use idiomatic Rust to handle error propagation at different stages of the compiler, by constructing specific structs (like TypeCheckError, CodeGenerateError, etc.) implementing std::error::Error to distinguish where an error occurred. It might be slightly more idiomatic if we changed errors to be explicit enums (like TypeCheckError::InvalidArgumentTypes, TypeCheckError::UnrecognizedIdentifier, etc.) but we chose against this for sake of development speed. It would also be more helpful if messages provided by errors included more specific information about the specific expressions or context causing the error, e.g. TypeCheckError: 'foo' was not recognized as a function name..

Style guide

A lot of the compiler passes operate heavily on types and transforming and validating different type annotations. Some of my initial code was inconsistent with the naming, but presently I am naming variables in new code (and trying to update older code) according to the following rules:

• No variables named named after keywords in Rust, such as type or fn
• The variable name typ alone is okay, but in all other cases the phrase type should be spelled out, e.g. type_vec or inner_type, not typ_vec or inner_typ.