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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

When creating a lexer, the first step is to identify what kinds of tokens you have and what data needs to be stored for each one of them. In this exercise, I decided to model the tokens as a variant with different types for each token.

Then, you need to define the regular expressions for how each token is matched, which will set the rules for what kind of input gets accepted in your language. I went ahead and noted the tokens that were needed for the sample code I had laid out before.

It is very unlikely that you will have a benefit in implementing a lexer by yourself; therefore, it’s important to evaluate various options of existing libraries. I decided to use the lexertl library because of its plain C++ API, which makes it easier to teach.

Finally, I implemented the lexer by just using the lexertl API, translating the rules that I had identified before. I included a test to validate that I get the correct set of tokens when processing a specific input...

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83
Tech Concepts
36
Programming languages
73
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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