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

Garbage Collection

Memory management is one of the most important aspects of modern programming. Almost any language that you invent should provide automatic heap memory management via garbage collection. Garbage collection refers to any mechanism by which heap memory is automatically freed and made available for reuse when it is no longer needed for a given purpose. The heap, as you may already know, is the region in memory from which objects are allocated by some explicit means such as the reserved word new (in Java). In lower-level languages, such objects live until the program explicitly frees them, but in many modern languages, heap objects are retained in memory as long as they are needed. After a heap object is of no further use in the program, its memory is made available to the program for other purposes by a garbage collection algorithm that runs behind the scenes in the programming language runtime system.

This chapter presents a couple of methods with which you can...