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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

An AST is a representation of the code that has a lot of higher-level semantics about how the code will actually be interpreted, while a parse tree is very focused on what’s required by the grammar engine.

There are many things that will be present in the parse tree but can be eliminated from the AST; at the same time, there are entirely new data structures. This is important because it gets us closer to what will be needed to actually generate code.

Designing the types for the AST of your language will require a lot of thought, while keeping in mind the relationship with the interpreter itself, as you want to start representing the semantics of how the code will run.

In the case of the language being designed in this book, that involved transforming the messages described by the parse tree into the state machines of the different agents, as well as identifying what all the actions those agents will need to take are.

Once you define the types for your...

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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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