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

Generating x64 output

As with many traditional compilers, the native code for Jzero will be produced by carrying out the following steps. First, we will write out a linked list of x64 objects in a human-readable assembler language with the .s extension. We then invoke the GNU assembler to turn that into a binary object file format with the .o extension. An executable is constructed by invoking a linker, which combines a set of .o files specified by the user with a set of .o files containing runtime library code, and data referenced from the generated code. This section presents each of these steps, starting with producing the assembler code.

Writing the x64 code in assembly language format

This section provides a brief description of the x64 assembler format as supported by the GNU assembler, which uses AT&T syntax. Instructions and pseudo-instructions occur on a line by themselves with a tab (or eight spaces) of indentation on the left. Labels are an exception to this...