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

Writing your own IDE versus supporting an existing one

Writing an IDE is a large project and could be the subject of an entire book. If all you want is for your new language to be supported by a good IDE, just figure out how to support your language within an existing popular IDE. This is especially true if supporting your language requires nothing unusual that existing IDEs do not already do. It is a big job, bigger in some IDEs than in others, but most of this chapter provides an example of how to do it in one mainstream IDE.

On the other hand, there are several reasons that you might decide to write your own IDE. Writing an IDE puts you in control. Writing an IDE in your new language can be a convincing demonstration of how awesome your new language is, that it has better user interface capabilities than mainstream languages, or that it has achieved a level of maturity and usability by virtue of a suitably robust class library and system interface.

Unlike other chapters...