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

Bytecode Interpreters

A new programming language may include novel features that are not supported directly by mainstream CPUs. The most practical way to generate code for many programming languages is to generate bytecode for an abstract machine whose instruction set directly supports the language’s intended domain. This is important because it sets your language free from the constraints of what current hardware CPUs know how to do. It also allows the generation of code that is tied more closely to the types of problems that you want to solve. If you create your own bytecode instruction set, you can execute programs by writing a virtual machine that knows how to interpret that instruction set. This chapter covers how to design an instruction set and an interpreter that executes bytecode. Because this chapter is tightly connected to Chapter 13, Generating Bytecode, you may want to read them both before you dive into the code.

This chapter covers the following main topics...