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Sysl Sysl

Installation

import { Steps, Tabs, TabItem, Aside, FileTree } from ‘@astrojs/starlight/components’;

Sysl today lives inside the trisc monorepo — the same repository as the TRISC assembler, emulator, linker, and the SLIX operating system. In the future the compiler will move to its own repository; for now, everything ships together.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • sbt 1.9 or newer
  • JDK 17+ (any modern OpenJDK works — Temurin is a good default)
  • git
  • (optional) clang with LLVM 17+ if you want to use the LLVM backend

Getting the source

Section titled “Getting the source”

  1. Clone the repository.

    Terminal window
    git clone https://github.com/edadma/trisc.git
    cd trisc

  2. Verify the build.

    Terminal window
    sbt compile

    On first run, sbt downloads Scala 3, the Scala Native and Scala.js toolchains, and a handful of other dependencies. Grab a coffee.

  3. Run the test suite (optional but recommended).

    Terminal window
    sbt test

Running a Sysl program

Section titled “Running a Sysl program”

Sysl has three backends, each invoked through sbt:

Terminal window
sbt "syslCliJVM/run run examples/fibonacci.sysl"

The interpreter is the fastest way to iterate. It’s also the reference implementation — if the TRISC and LLVM backends disagree with it, the interpreter is right by definition.
Terminal window
# Compile to a TRISC Object File (.tof), link against the runtime, run the emulator.
sbt "syslCliJVM/run compile examples/fibonacci.sysl --emit tof -o /tmp/fib.tof"
sbt "triscCliJVM/run run /tmp/fib.tof"

The TRISC backend produces assembly you can read. Use --emit asm to dump assembly, or disasm a .tof file to see what the linker did.
Terminal window
sbt "syslCliJVM/run compile examples/fibonacci.sysl --backend llvm --emit ll -o /tmp/fib.ll"
clang /tmp/fib.ll -o /tmp/fib
/tmp/fib

Full native compilation. The generated IR is normal LLVM — it goes through every optimiser pass and produces machine code indistinguishable from hand-written C.

Repository layout

Section titled “Repository layout”

Sysl’s sources live under the sysl/ subproject. Neighbour projects are the assembler, emulator, linker, and the SLIX kernel.

- trisc/ - sysl/ **Sysl compiler and interpreter** - src/main/scala/io/github/edadma/trisc/ - SyslLexer.scala indentation-sensitive tokeniser - SyslParser.scala AST producer - SyslAnalyzer.scala type checker and semantic analysis - SyslInterpreter.scala tree-walk interpreter - SyslTriscCodegen.scala TRISC assembly codegen - SyslLLVMCodegen.scala LLVM IR codegen - SyslDriver.scala multi-module orchestration - src/test/scala/ **the reference test suite** - sysl-cli/ command-line entry points (`sysl compile`, `sysl run`, `sysl test`, `sysl doc`) - std/ **standard library in literate Sysl (.lsysl)** - examples/ runnable sample programs - sysl-reference.md canonical normative reference - oskit/ SLIX kernel and servers — the biggest Sysl program in existence - trisc-cli/ assembler, linker, emulator front-end

Editor support

Section titled “Editor support”

The site ships a TextMate grammar at src/grammars/sysl.tmLanguage.json used for syntax highlighting here. Drop it into your editor’s language support directory for colours. First- class LSP is on the roadmap but not shipped yet — for now, the compiler’s error messages are the best feedback you get.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”