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

Native Code Generation

This chapter shows you how to take the intermediate code from Chapter 9, Intermediate Code Generation, and generate native code. The term native refers to whatever instruction set is provided by hardware on a given machine. This chapter presents a simple native code generator for x64, a dominant architecture on laptops and desktops.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

  • Deciding whether to generate native code
  • Introducing the x64 instruction set
  • Using registers
  • Converting intermediate code to x64 code
  • Generating x64 output

The skills developed here include basic register allocation, instruction selection, writing assembler files, and invoking the assembler and linker to produce a native executable. The functionality built into this chapter generates code that runs natively on typical computers.