kit - a compilation multi-tool

Kit Is a Toolchain.

Kit is a compilation multi-tool written in C11, featuring a C11 compiler along with many other tools one may need to compile, link, run, and distribute code.

Its inspirations are TCC, MIR, and LLVM.

It features:

• A C11 preprocessor
• A single-pass C11 parser and code generator
• A JIT compiler, linker, and in-process executor
• An IR interpreter (run --no-jit)
• A user-mode ELF emulator (per-basic-block JIT translation)
• A lightweight optimizer (-O1) with SSA construction, register allocation, and local cleanup
• Cross-compiling backends for aarch64, x86-64, and riscv64, plus WebAssembly and a portable C-source backend
• Support for object files and executables (PE/COFF, ELF, Mach-O)
• Primary tested targets: x86_64-linux, aarch64-linux, x86_64-macos, aarch64-macos, x86_64-windows, aarch64-windows, riscv64-linux, plus freestanding variants of the same architectures.
• An assembler, standalone and inline, with basic linker-script support
• A disassembler and object/image inspection
• Object and binary utilities: ar, ranlib, nm, size, strip, objcopy, objdump, addr2line, strings
• Standalone gzip and LZ4-frame compression (compress), interoperable with stock gzip/lz4
• Content hashing (hash: SHA-256, BLAKE2b-256, CRC-32)
• Drop-in standard names for the above: sha256sum, b2sum, crc32, gzip, gunzip, lz4, lz4c
• A single multi-call binary, with an install command that drops per-tool symlinks (hard links on Windows) into a directory for drop-in toolchain use
• Debug info generation and consumption (DWARF)
• An interactive debugger
• Header dependency generation
• Reproducible builds
• Signed, content-addressed code distribution (.kpkg)
• Bootstrap from hex0-seed
• A C library providing access to all of the above

kit also provides these headers beyond the freestanding set:

• stdatomic.h
• assert.h
• setjmp.h

And kit-specific extensions:

• kit/syscall.h
• kit/baremetal.h
• kit/coro.h

Documentation

Start with doc/DESIGN.md — the entrypoint that covers kit's design principles, layered architecture, and primary data flows, and indexes a design doc for every major subsystem (frontends, codegen, IR, optimizer, arch backends, object formats, linker, JIT, emulator, debug info, debugger, runtime, driver, packaging, …). Forward-looking roadmaps live in doc/plan/. Code-interface detail lives in the public headers under include/kit/.