Verbose is a small experimental language I'm building. Its compiler proves properties about your code — like termination — and emits tiny, readable x86-64 machine code: no runtime, no GC, no libc. This post stands on its own (you don't need the rest of the series). What it's about: I'm now writing a Verbose compiler in Verbose itself, and this is the foundation brick — how you represent a program as data so a compiler can work on it.
(English version of an article from my French series, originally on arcker.org.)
After cryptography, we take on something more vertiginous: a Verbose compiler written in Verbose. The language starting to describe itself.
Let's be honest up front — it matters. This is not (yet) verbosec compiling the entirety of its own source. What exists today is a complete front end — tokenizer, parser, analyses, interpreter, type checker — written in Verbose, for a toy subset of the language. The whole thing compiled by verbosec to native machine code. Not an interpreted demo: a ~60 KB ELF binary that reads your program and tells you what's wrong with it. That's examples/vexprparse.verbose: 102 concepts, 219 rules.
We'll walk through it brick by brick. This chapter lays the foundation without which nothing else exists: how to represent a program.
