Improvement ideas

[laurenthuberdeau]

Some ideas on how to improve the project:

New features

• Support do {...} while (...); statements. #91
• Support variadic functions in pnut-exe
• Support & on local and global variables in Shell backend.
• Generate executables compatible with macOS and Windows. Bonus points if they are αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε.
• ARM/RISC-V backends.

Optimizations

• Pre-allocate AST nodes before recursive call to use AST node memory as return location for fun calls.
• Separate heap in 2 zones: one for the global state and one for the current declaration.
• Manually manage stack of local variables in parser to save on local variable management.
• Reuse assignment variable as temporary when possible. i.e. a = f(f(a)) => _f a $a; _f a $a; instead of _f __t1 $a; _f a $__t1.

Code quality / Tech debt

• Unify the way the environment is tracked in the shell and exe backends.
• Add a CI/CD pipeline that tests Pnut on all supported platforms and makes releases for them.
• Improve errors produced by Pnut.
• Rewrite pnut to use structs. Remove structs from pnut: Remove use of struct from pnut's source code #186

Other

• Improve README.md.
• Make a landing page for Pnut on pnut.sh.
• Add more examples.

[xplshn]

I think it'd be impressive to add the tools over at https://git.suckless.org/sbase/files.html as examples. That'd also be exciting for people interested in writing pure SH scripts (scripts that don't call external commands). :)