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

Using GNU Make

Command lines are growing longer and longer, and you will get very tired of typing the commands required to build a programming language. We are already using Unicon, Java, uflex, jflex, iyacc, and BYACC/J. Few tools for building large programs are multi-platform and multi-language enough for this toolset. We will use the ultimate multi-platform, multi-language software build tool: GNU Make.

Once the Make program is installed on your path, you can store the build rules for Unicon or Java, or both, in a file named a makefile (or Makefile), and then just run Make whenever you have changed the code and need to rebuild. A full treatment of Make is beyond the scope of this book, but here are the key points.

A makefile is like a lex or yacc specification, except instead of recognizing patterns of strings, a makefile specifies a graph of build dependencies between files. For each file, the makefile contains the source files it depends on as well as a list of one or...