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Cranelift Native Backend

The Cranelift backend compiles Pith programs directly to native machine code via a self-hosted IR emitter. The pipeline is fully self-hosted on the frontend (lex/parse/check/emit_ir in Pith), with Rust handling IR consumption and native codegen.

Architecture

Pith source (.pith)
  → self-hosted IR emitter (ir_emitter.pith → text IR)
  → ir_consumer.rs (text IR → Cranelift IR)
  → Cranelift native code generation
  → object file (.o)
  → system linker (gcc)
  → native executable

status

the current self-hosted frontend plus Cranelift backend handles the tracked deterministic example suite and the native tls stack used by the live tls echo coverage in this repo.

some networking examples remain environment-dependent rather than compiler-dependent. those are still better treated as live probes than as portable deterministic signals.

The deterministic suite covers: structs, enums, match, generics, lambdas/closures, collections (List/Map/Set), string methods, error propagation (try/fail), concurrency (spawn/await), JSON/TOML/URL parsing, file I/O, path/process helpers, and more.

codebase (~12,500 lines Rust)

counts drift as the code moves; make status-audit prints the live totals.

Component Lines Purpose
cranelift/runtime/src/ 8,386 runtime storage, ARC, collections, OS/IO, crypto helpers
cranelift/codegen/src/ 2,172 text IR → Cranelift lowering and link support
cranelift/cli/src/ 517 CLI (build/run/check/parse/lex)
cranelift/codegen/src/ir_consumer.rs 1,779 text IR → Cranelift IR
cranelift/runtime/src/collections/list.rs 835 list runtime
cranelift/runtime/src/collections/map.rs 767 map runtime
cranelift/runtime/src/host_fs.rs 474 file and host filesystem helpers
cranelift/runtime/src/runtime_core.rs 666 core runtime glue
cranelift/runtime/src/string_list.rs 428 string list helpers
cranelift/runtime/src/crypto.rs 396 AEAD, x25519, signature, and TLS-facing crypto kernels

Self-Hosting Status: Complete

The Cranelift backend compiles the entire self-hosted compiler into a working native binary. The self-hosted compiler plus stdlib source surface is now well past 40k lines, with the frontend and most language logic already living in Pith rather than Rust.

Verified:

  • pith version, lex, parse, check — all work
  • pith build / pith run — compiles and executes the tracked example suite
  • std.net.tls now owns both client and server TLS 1.3 handshakes in Pith
  • Fixed-point reached: the self-hosted frontend and Cranelift backend rebuild the compiler and pass the tracked example, stdlib, and regression suites

Building

cargo build --release                           # build the Cranelift backend
./target/release/pith run examples/hello.pith    # compile and run
./target/release/pith build examples/hello.pith  # compile to native binary