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

Introducing the x64 instruction set

This section provides a brief overview of the x64 instruction set. You are encouraged to consult Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) or Intel’s architecture programmer’s manuals for more information. Douglas Thain’s book Introduction to Compilers and Language Design, available at http://compilerbook.org, has helpful x64 material.

x64 is a complex instruction set with many backward-compatibility features. This chapter covers the subset of x64 that is used to build a basic Jzero code generator. We are using AT&T assembler syntax so that our generated output can be converted into the binary object file format by the GNU assembler. This is for the sake of multiplatform portability.

x64 has hundreds of instructions with names such as ADD for addition or MOV to move (copy) a value to a new location. When an instruction has two operands, at most, one may be a reference to main memory. x64 instructions can have a suffix to indicate...