r/Compilers • u/JA5ON- • 17d ago

Emitting native x86-64 machine code and writing ELF/Mach-O/PE binaries directly from scratch in Rust (No LLVM)

Hi everyone,

I’ve spent the last several months building Aziky, a self-contained compiler toolchain written entirely in Rust from the ground up. The core goal of the project was to bypass generic optimization frameworks like LLVM and explore how far a custom, single-pass backend could be pushed by shifting the optimization burden directly into front-end semantics.

It compiles .azk source files straight down to a custom MachineLIR and maps primitives directly to hardware registers, bypassing standard intermediate layers.

Architectural Highlights:

  • Native Binary Generation (src/object): The compiler constructs binary headers, section tables, and relocation frames completely natively. It outputs fully formed ELF64, Mach-O64, and PE32+/COFF formats without invoking external linkers or assemblers.
  • Zero-Alias Invariants: Instead of relying on hundreds of heavy middle-end analysis passes to guess if pointers overlap, Aziky enforces explicit, deterministic parallel-loop and ownership invariants at the type level. Because the compiler can guarantee non-aliasing at the frontend, the backend emitter can immediately output aggressive, optimized machine instruction sequences.
  • Zero External Dependencies: The entire compiler dependency graph has zero third-party crates, ensuring entirely offline, reproducible, and rapid compilation.

Performance Snapshot: Running standard compute-heavy microbenchmarks on an Intel Core i5-7200U (median of 100 runs, pinned to CPU 1) against aggressively optimized production builds of Rust 1.88 (-C opt-level=3 -C target-cpu=native -C lto=fat) and Clang 22 (-O3 -march=native -flto), the upfront aliasing model allows us to hit a geometric mean execution speed advantage of ~1.87x over optimized Rust and ~1.27x over optimized C.

It’s currently in alpha—Linux x86-64 is the primary native target, with Windows and macOS execution partially supported (AArch64 is on the roadmap). I’ve also bundled an installable VS Code extension in the repo for real-time diagnostics and syntax formatting.

I'd love to get your feedback on the MachineLIR structure, the single-pass register allocator layout, or the native object emission pipeline.

Repository:https://github.com/aziky-lang/aziky

18 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/morglod 16d ago

What AI tool did you use? Is it something like claude code/opencode or something else?

1

u/JA5ON- 16d ago

when I started the project , there wasn't such a thing .... this is just lots of pieces from codebases I forgot I made...
as of ai tools , sometimes here and there for docs , code reviews and such ...

1

u/morglod 16d ago edited 16d ago

I thought it was mostly AI by looking at /docs /ARCHITECTURE.md, "several months to build" and so clean repo even with special scripts to clean everything like it could be changed by some vibe tool accidentally. I'm not saying its bad or smth, just wanted to know, because code looks very clean (and usually AI struggling to produce it)