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

Preprocessors and Transpilers

This chapter returns us from our detour into IDEs back to the quest of generating output from our source program that can run. There are many ways to produce executable output from a programming language, and rather than pick just one in order to adhere to a rigid sequential narrative, this and the next couple chapters are a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure book that explores three ways of producing an executable: this chapter discusses translation to another high-level language, while Chapter 12 presents translation to a lower-level software instruction set called a bytecode machine, and Chapter 13 illustrates translation to native code that runs on the hardware’s instruction set.

The ordering of these three chapters is intentional. The code generation for this chapter is easier to implement but offers slower performance than the strategy demonstrated in Chapter 12, which is easier but slower than the strategy of Chapter 13. You may want...