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

Summary

This chapter showed you a lot about garbage collection. You learned what garbage is, how it comes about, and saw two very different ways to deal with it. The easy way, popularized by some early Lisp systems and early versions of Python, is called reference counting. In reference counting, the allocated objects themselves are made responsible for their collection. This usually works.

The more difficult form of garbage collection involves finding all the live data in the program and usually moving it to avoid memory fragmentation. Finding the live data is generally recursive, requires traversing stacks to find references in parameters and local variables, and is usually an onerous and low-level task. Many variations on this general idea have been implemented. One of the primary observations, which some garbage collectors exploit, is that most allocated objects are used for only a short time and then become garbage almost immediately. Collecting recently-allocated objects...