Compiler design frontend calculation in the main function for Clang and Zig

Question

I have started reading the source code of clang and zig-lang . Unfortunately, the source codes are complicated and I am not able to find out where is frontend of these compilers are called in the main function.

In clang , the closer place I have found is here but it does not look like processing the compilation frontend.

In zig-lang , the main function is even messier and very hard to understand. I just could find the de facto main function (main0) here .

Though, explaining the stages of these compilers and pointing to their code is appreciated, just the point of where frontends computations are called is sufficient for me.

Answer 1

The main zig compiler is executed from Compilation.performAllTheWork . This function loops over all the compilation items and compiles them. ( main() → buildOutputType → updateModule → Compilation.update → Compilation.performAllTheWork)

Stage1 (the default compiler in zig 0.8.0, written in C++) is called when stage1_module items are found in the work queue from Compilation.updateStage1Module . The bulk of compilation happens from codegen_build_object (called from zig_stage1_build_object )

Stage2 (the work-in-progress faster compiler written in Zig) is more tightly integrated into the work queue because it supports incremental compilation and is called in these branches of the work queue switch.

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Clang starts somewhere, maybe in clang.lib.frontend.CompilerInvocation ?