Carder

Compiler backend that targets the BEAM.

Documentation

---

this is a large experimental project. no promises made. don't use it in production, it's pretty slow right now (that will be fixed in the future)

carder takes a language-neutral IR and compiles it to Core Erlang, then to a real .beam you can load and call. it isn't a VM: it converts the code and optimises it for the BEAM and for functional programming.

carder is only the backend. frontends live in their own repos: scribbler for WebAssembly and arc for JavaScript.

try it

carder builds with gleam 1.18 on erlang/otp 29. there's a corpus of .ir programs under test/carder/ir/corpus/:

$ gleam run -- run test/carder/ir/corpus/add.ir add 3 5
8

that compiles add.ir all the way to a .beam, loads it and calls its add export with 3 and 5. gleam run -- help lists the other commands, which run or dump each stage of the pipeline on its own.

writing a frontend

specs/FRONTEND-API.md is the interface. the short version is that you build a carder/ir.Module and call:

pipeline.compile_ir(module, binding)            // -> loadable .beam bytes
pipeline.run_ir(module, binding, export, args)  // -> compile + run it

contributing

help is welcome. the plan lives in the specs/ folder, so message me on Discord (@hiett) first and we'll split the work so nothing overlaps.

license

Apache License 2.0. see NOTICE for attribution.