Aether

Aether is a personal learning project focused on applied compiler design, built incrementally in C.

The goal of this project is to understand how a compiler is constructed from first principles by actually building one, step by step, rather than relying on abstractions or frameworks.

At the moment, the project is intentionally minimal and exploratory.

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Current State

• Single source file: main.c
• Basic lexer implementation
• Reads a .ae source file
• Tokenizes simple constructs (keywords, numbers, symbols)
• Prints tokens for inspection and debugging

There is no parser, AST, or code generation yet.

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Example

Input (test.ae):

exit(100);

Current lexer output:

EXIT
OPEN_PAREN
NUMBER(100)
CLOSE_PAREN
SEMICOLON

This output is meant purely for learning and verification while developing the lexer.

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Learning Roadmap

1. Lexical analysis
2. Parsing and AST construction
3. Arithmetic expressions
4. Assembly code generation
5. Variables and scopes
6. Stack management
7. Control flow (if, while)
8. Console output
9. Compiling simple programs

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Motivation

This project exists to:

• Learn how real compilers work internally
• Practice systems programming in C
• Build intuition around lexing, parsing, and code generation
• Gain hands-on experience before moving to more advanced compiler work

There are no ambitions yet beyond learning and experimentation.

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Status

🚧 Work in progress

The code is expected to be rewritten, refactored, and broken frequently as understanding improves.