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

Understanding what bytecode is

Bytecode is a sequence of machine instructions encoded in a binary format and written not for a CPU to execute, but instead for an abstract (or virtual) machine instruction set that embodies the semantics of a given programming language. Although many bytecode instruction sets for languages such as Java use a byte as the smallest instruction size, almost all of them include longer instructions. Such longer instructions have one or more operands. Since many kinds of operands must be aligned at a word boundary with an address that is a multiple of four or eight, a better name for many forms of bytecode might be wordcode. The term bytecode is commonly used for such abstract machines, regardless of the instruction’s size.

The languages that are directly responsible for popularizing bytecode are Pascal and SmallTalk. These languages adopted bytecode for different reasons that remain important considerations for programming languages that are defined...