JIT compiler for BASIC

This is a small JIT compiler for a version of the BASIC programming language, running on the x86-64 or 64-bit ARM (aarch64) architecture.

About

Features

This is a relatively basic version of BASIC, but it has some interesting features.

• Variable names can have any length and are case sensitive
• Variable names can include keywords if they also contain other characters
• Labels can be used instead of line numbers
• There is support for 64bit integers, double-precision floats, strings and booleans
• Being a JIT compiler the execution is relatively fast (There is some compilation overhead)
• The JIT supports calling out to simple native functions

Limitations

This implementation of the BASIC programming language has multiple limitations, not present in some others.

• It doesn't have any runtime errors
  • Array buffer overflows are not checked
  • There is no buffer overflow detection on READ
  • There is no type check on READ
  • There is no integer overflow detection
  • ...
• Array elements can't be used as a FOR-loop counter variable
• Array dimentions must be constant
• When loading files, lines will not be sorted by number

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/rolandbernard/basic-jit
cd basic-jit
make BUILD=release
./build/release/bin/basicjit

Hello world

The classic "Hello world"-program for basic works just fine:

10  Print "Hello world!"
20  Goto 10