Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition

By : Clinton L. Jeffery
Book Image

Build Your Own Programming Language - Second Edition

By: Clinton L. Jeffery

Overview of this book

There are many reasons to build a programming language: out of necessity, as a learning exercise, or just for fun. Whatever your reasons, this book gives you the tools to succeed. You’ll build the frontend of a compiler for your language and generate a lexical analyzer and parser using Lex and YACC tools. Then you’ll explore a series of syntax tree traversals before looking at code generation for a bytecode virtual machine or native code. In this edition, a new chapter has been added to assist you in comprehending the nuances and distinctions between preprocessors and transpilers. Code examples have been modernized, expanded, and rigorously tested, and all content has undergone thorough refreshing. You’ll learn to implement code generation techniques using practical examples, including the Unicon Preprocessor and transpiling Jzero code to Unicon. You'll move to domain-specific language features and learn to create them as built-in operators and functions. You’ll also cover garbage collection. Dr. Jeffery’s experiences building the Unicon language are used to add context to the concepts, and relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow along in your language of choice. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific language.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section I: Programming Language Frontends
7
Section II: Syntax Tree Traversals
13
Section III: Code Generation and Runtime Systems
22
Section IV: Appendix
23
Answers
24
Other Books You May Enjoy
25
Index

Intermediate Code Generation

After the semantic analysis is complete, you can contemplate how to execute the program. For compilers, the next step is to produce a sequence of machine-independent instructions called intermediate code. This chapter starts by defining intermediate code and then shows you how to generate intermediate code, by looking at examples for the Jzero language. After the preceding chapters, where you learned how to write tree traversals that analyze and add information to the syntax tree constructed from the input, in this chapter we finally begin the process of constructing the compiler’s output. Intermediate code generation is usually followed by an optimization phase and final code generation for a target machine.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

  • What is intermediate code?
  • An intermediate code instruction set
  • Generating code for expressions
  • Generating code for control flow

We will start by gaining...