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

Building a bytecode instruction set for Jzero

This section describes a simple file format and instruction set for Jzero code, generated from three-address intermediate code. This is very much a toy instruction set. For the language that you create, you instead might decide to use (possibly a subset of) a real instruction set such as the Java bytecode instruction set. Java bytecode is a complicated format; if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be going to the trouble of presenting something simpler. The instruction set presented here is slightly more capable than Jzero uses, to allow for common extensions.

Defining the Jzero bytecode file format

The Jzero bytecode format consists of a header, followed by a data section, followed by a sequence of instructions. Jzero bytecode files are interpreted as a sequence of 8-byte words in little-endian format. The header consists of an optional self-execution script, a magic word, a version number, and the word offset of the first instruction...