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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By : Daniel Ruoso
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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By: Daniel Ruoso

Overview of this book

Designing a custom programming language can be the most effective way to solve certain types of problems—especially when precision, safety, or domain-specific expressiveness matters. This book guides you through the full process of designing and implementing your own programming language and interpreter, from language design to execution, using modern C++. You’ll start by exploring when and why building a domain-specific language is worth it, and how to design one to fit a specific problem domain. Along the way, you’ll examine real-world interpreter architectures and see how their design decisions affect language behavior, capabilities, and runtime trade-offs. The book then walks through the entire process of interpreter implementation: defining syntax, building a lexer and parser, designing an abstract syntax tree, generating executable instructions, and implementing a runtime. All examples are in modern C++, with a focus on clean architecture and real-world usability. By the end, you’ll have a fully working interpreter for a domain-specific language designed to handle network protocols—plus the knowledge and tools to design your own programming language from scratch. *Email sign-up and proof of purchase required
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
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1
Modeling the Programming Language Runtime Environment
7
Modeling the Programming Language Syntax
12
Implementing the Interpreter Runtime
16
Interpreting Source Code
24
Index

Designing the interface for I/O

As implied in Chapter 1, the goal is to make the interpreter independent of specific event loop frameworks, allowing the interpreter to be used in as many situations as possible.

Another consequence of that choice is that I only need to interact with the specific parts of the input and output operations that are relevant to how the protocols supported by this language are needed. In particular, that means I really only need to be able to handle the needs for the reads and writes.

I will go back to the sans I/O approach, where all that is needed is a mechanism to receive bytes, and to communicate which bytes have to be written.

I had a placeholder API for InputOutputOperation in the previous section; let me actually refine it now.

There is one subtlety that is relevant now, which is that the sequence of bytes received from the network does not necessarily match the number of bytes this specific operation needs. If there are fewer, the...

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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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