CPL: A Compact C-like Systems Language with Explicit Low-Level Control
TL;DR
CPL is presented, a compact C-like systems language that retains C's direct access to memory, layout, and machine interfaces while experimenting with a smaller grammar and selected conveniences from newer languages, and whether C-like are more convenient to use for compiler experiments than modern approaches and paradigms.
Abstract
This paper presents Cordell Programming Language (CPL), a compact C-like systems language that retains C's direct access to memory, layout, and machine interfaces while experimenting with a smaller grammar and selected conveniences from newer languages. Also this paper studies whether C-like are more convenient to use for compiler experiments than modern approaches and paradigms. While the language and compiler provide primitive values, pointers, arrays, containers with methods, unions, generic functions, overloads, entry-point and section control, system calls, and inline assembly, they do not provide high-level constructs such as classes, built-in methods, a standard library, or memory protection. The article describes the language design, compiler pipeline, target backends, static-analysis architecture, and OS-facing use cases, then evaluates the prototype backend with reproducible x86_64 and i386 microbenchmarks against C compiler baselines. The obtained results suggest that the compiler can produce code comparable to that produced by production compilers such as GCC and Clang, as well as by small compilers such as TinyC and SmallerC.