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

Writing built-in functions

Low-level languages such as C have no built-in functions; they have standard libraries that contain functions available to all programs. Linking a function to your program and calling it is conceptually the same action, whether it is a library function or a user-defined function. The higher the language level, the more conspicuous the difference between what is written for its runtime system in a lower-level implementation language and what is written by end users in the language itself. Let’s consider how to implement built-ins in the bytecode interpreter.

Adding built-in functions to the bytecode interpreter

Let’s implement System.out.println() in the bytecode interpreter. One of our design options is to implement a new bytecode machine instruction for each built-in function, including println(). This doesn’t scale well to thousands of built-in functions. We could implement a callnative instruction, providing us with a way...