uutils AWK progress report

[Alonely0]

I will be updating this issue as we make progress. Please feel free to take down good first issues here and in the issue tracker.

Interpreter Tasklist

This is mostly a replica of the tasklist in Discord. We are looking forward to building a basic bytecode interpreter to get integration testing going, whose IR is isomorphic to Cranelift IR for easy JITting. The design sketch is for it to be a cooperative I/O machine, probably built with smol; if we want to better support AWK's long-forgotten number-crunching intent, we could easily extend this to parallel computations.

• Array lookup lowering, for-each loops, etc.
• Arrays and deletes.
• Internal/built-in variables in symbol table, maybe ft. lexer & parser for missing ones.
• Record splitting ($expr expressions).
• general I/O w/ async (smol runtime).
• Stitching together whole-source lowering.
• Function lowering.
• Function execution and returning.
• Library loading (via libloading) and C function calls.
• Switch/case lowering.
• Short-circuiting &&/||.
• Regex matching with automaton memoization.
• Etc.