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

Grasping the importance of garbage collection

In the beginning, programs were small, and the static allocation of memory was decided when a program was designed. The code was not that complicated, and programmers could lay out all the memory that they were going to use during the entire program as a set of global variables. Life was good. A lot of programmers would prefer to just stick with static allocation, and in certain niche application domains, that remains feasible.

For the rest of us, Moore’s Law happened, and computers got bigger. Data got bigger. Customers started demanding that programs handle arbitrary-sized data instead of accepting the fixed upper limits inherent in static allocation. Programmers invented structured programming and used function calls to organize larger programs in which most memory allocation was on the stack.

A stack provides a form of dynamic memory allocation. Stacks are great because you can allocate a big chunk of memory when a function...