M2-Planet/docs/M2-Planet.1

.\"Made with Love
.TH M2-Planet 1 "JULY 2019" Linux "User Manuals"
.SH NAME

M2-Planet \- The PLAtform NEutral Transpiler (Or just terrible C compiler)

.SH SYNOPSIS
.na

M2-Planet --architecture ARCHITECTURE --file FILE [--output FILE] [--debug]

.SH DESCRIPTION

M2 is the most minimal C compiler that can be bootstrapped from Hex
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At it's core is the minimal subset of the C language required
to make a more powerful C compiler. (with a few extras for convience)

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Those core primitives being: if (with continue), while (with
break), asm, structs (with -> support) gotos (with labels) and return.

With do and for loops, arrays and function pointers as nice extras
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The supported ARCHITECTURES are as follows: knight-native,
knight-posix, x86, amd64, armv7l, aarch64.
(with planned ports to z80 and 6502)
If you fail to specify an architecture, the default of knight-native
will be used.

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As M2-Planet's libc is literally only a half-dozen lines of assembly
you will likely need to import libc primitives when building or
having previously built them seperately.

You can find examples for such primitives in:
test/common_x86/functions/
test/common_amd64/functions/
test/common_armv7l/functions/
test/common_aarch64/functions/
test/common_knight/functions/

with the default libc implementations and elf-headers in the
parent directories correspondingly.

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.SH EXAMPLES

Typically, M2-Planet will be called in scripts used in bootstrapping

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# M2-Planet --architecture x86 -f return.c -o return.M1
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Then to convert the assembled output into a working binary,
M1 and hex2 are used to convert the assembly output of M2-Planet;
with blood-elf generating dwarf stubs if additional debug info is
desired.
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# M1 -f test/common_x86/x86_defs.M1 -f test/common_x86/libc-core.M1 \
-f return.M1 --LittleEndian --architecture x86 -o return.hex2


# hex2 -f test/common_x86/ELF-i386.hex2 -f return.hex2 --LittleEndian \
--architecture x86 --BaseAddress 0x8048000 -o example --exec_enable
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.SH COMPATIBILITY

M2-Planet is compatible with all Turing complete machines;
even the ones that try to be Turing complete -1

.SH AUTHORS
Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
.br
Jan (janneke) Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>

.SH COPYRIGHT
Copyright 2016-2019 Jeremiah Orians <Jeremiah@pdp10.guru>
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Copyright 2017 Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org>
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License GPLv3+.

.SH "SEE ALSO"
M1(1), hex2(1), blood-elf(1), kaem(1), syscalls(2)