Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language

By : Clinton L. Jeffery
Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language

By: Clinton L. Jeffery

Overview of this book

The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software. In this book, you’ll start with implementing the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how domain-specific language features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. We’ll conclude with how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts where relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow the code of your choice of either a very high-level language with advanced features, or a mainstream language. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Programming Language Frontends
7
Section 2: Syntax Tree Traversals
13
Section 3: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
21
Section 4: Appendix

Chapter 13: Native Code Generation

This chapter shows how to take the intermediate code from Chapter 9, Intermediate Code Generation, and generate native code. The term native refers to whatever instruction set is provided in hardware on a given machine. This chapter presents a simple native code generator for x64, the dominant architecture on laptops and desktops.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

  • Deciding whether to generate native code
  • Introducing the x64 instruction set
  • Using registers
  • Converting intermediate code to x64 code
  • Generating x64 output

The skills developed here include basic register allocation, instruction selection, writing assembler files, and invoking the assembler and linker to produce a native executable. The functionality built into this chapter generates code that runs natively on typical computers.