Zoodle

Zoodle is a compiler for a minimalist Toy Language written in Zig. It compiles source code into WebAssembly (WASM), with a focus on understanding low-level systems programming, memory management, concurrency, and compiler internals.

This project is educational and hands-on — not just a compiler, but a complete deep dive into modern systems programming with Zig.

🚀 Project Goals

• Build a real compiler from scratch using Zig
• Learn memory allocation, concurrency, and binary encoding
• Output real .wasm binaries that run in browsers and WASM runtimes

🧩 Toy Language Features

The Toy Language is intentionally small but expressive. It supports:

• int, boolean, and string types
• Immutable variables using let
• Arithmetic and logical expressions
• Functions with typed parameters and return values
• Control flow: if, while, return
• Entry point: fn main() -> int

Example program:

fn add(a: int, b: int) -> int {
  return a + b;
}

fn main() -> int {
  let result: int = add(3, 4);
  return result;
}

📦 Compiler Pipeline

Zoodle's compilation steps:

1. Lexing – Breaks source code into tokens
2. Parsing – Converts tokens to an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
3. Semantic Analysis – Validates types and scoping
4. IR Generation – Produces an intermediate representation
5. WASM Codegen – Converts IR into .wasm binary
6. CLI / REPL – Runs and interacts with the compiled code

🔧 Technologies

• Zig – Systems programming language
• WebAssembly (binary + WAT format)
• Custom parser, memory allocators, and concurrency features

📚 Documentation

• Evaluating C, C++, Rust, and Zig for Modern Low-Level Development (Design Philosophies)
• Evaluating C, C++, Rust, and Zig for Modern Low-Level Development (Memory Management)
• Evaluating C, C++, Rust, and Zig for Modern Low-Level Development (Concurrency Mechanisms)
• Evaluating C, C++, Rust, and Zig for Modern Low-Level Development (Error Handling)
• Evaluating C, C++, Rust, and Zig for Modern Low-Level Development (Developer Experience, Portability, Benchmarks and Adoption)

🤝 Contributing

This is a learning-focused project. Contributions, bug reports, and questions are welcome! Just open an issue or a pull request.

📄 License

MIT License. See LICENSE file for details.