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

Marking live data and sweeping the rest

This section gives an overview of the Unicon garbage collector, which is a mark-and-sweep style of garbage collector that was developed for the Icon language and then extended. It is written in (an extended dialect of) C, like the rest of the Icon and Unicon runtime system. Since Unicon inherited this garbage collector from Icon, much of what you see here is due to the many folks who implemented that language. All I did to it was add its “multiple regions” support, which seemed like a good idea at the time of 64KB heap limits on 640KB MS-DOS computers. Other aspects of this garbage collector are described in the book The Implementation of Icon and Unicon: a Compendium.

In almost all garbage collectors other than reference counting, the approach to collection is to find all the live pointers that are reachable from all the variables in the program; everything else in the heap is garbage. In a mark-and-sweep collector, live data...