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

Linking, loading, and including the runtime system

In a separately compiled native code language, the output binary format from the compile step is not usually executable. Machine code is output in an object file that must be linked together with other modules, and addresses between them resolved, to form an executable. The runtime system is included at this point, by linking in object files that come with the compiler, not just other modules written by the user. In the old days, loading the resulting executable was a trivial operation. In modern systems, it is more complex due to things such as shared object libraries.

A bytecode implementation often has substantial differences from the traditional model just described. Java performs no link step, or perhaps you can say that it links code in at load time. The Java runtime system might be considered sharply divided between a large amount of functionality that is built into the Java VM (JVM) interpreter and an also-large amount...