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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

Summary

The stack machine that we had implemented so far was sufficient for trivial executions, but it could not handle more complex control flow operations.

To implement support for conditionals, I introduced the ability for the stack machine to reference the executable code as a value and for the interpreter to start executing that value. This is important because the branches in the operation tree should not be traversed until the operation selects which path to take.

The interpreter, for its part, needs to be able to recognize when it needs to switch from executing one particular stack to start executing a different one. The direction used here was to represent these different stacks as different continuations, with the state of the continuation allowing the interpreter to manage that transparently.

Beyond conditionals, it’s also necessary to support a sequence of operations as well as the list of arguments to a function. That requires a new type of operation...

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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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