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Advice for writing my own compiler?

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swordsmanluke@programming.dev
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I want to make my programming language! …for fun.

I’ve been reading LLVM’s own tutorial, which is really good. I’m curious though, for those of you who have written your own languages before… What do you wish you had known before you set out?

In terms of previous experience, I have written a really basic lexer and parser for a non-executable markup language I designed. Now I’m curious about the next level. I have some ideas for a language design I’d like to try out. The language features themselves are nothing new - I’m sure some other language out there has done these things and done it better. That’s fine! I just want to better understand how all this stuff hangs together.

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cerement@slrpnk.net
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  • WAY back in the annals of computer history
    • the Dragon Book – the definitive book, but very much a classroom book (VERY dry reading)
    • SICP – looking at how to program (and thus why programming languages are built the way they are)
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Programming Languages

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Hello!

This is the current Lemmy equivalent of https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/.

The content and rules are the same here as they are over there. Taken directly from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages overview:

This community is dedicated to the theory, design and implementation of programming languages.

Be nice to each other. Flame wars and rants are not welcomed. Please also put some effort into your post.

This isn’t the right place to ask questions such as “What language should I use for X”, “what language should I learn”, and “what’s your favorite language”. Such questions should be posted in /c/learn_programming or /c/programming.

This is the right place for posts like the following:

  • “Check out this new language I’ve been working on!”
  • “Here’s a blog post on how I implemented static type checking into this compiler”
  • “I want to write a compiler, where do I start?”
  • “How does the Java compiler work? How does it handle forward declarations/imports/targeting multiple platforms/<other tricky feature>?”
  • “How should I test my compiler? How are other compilers and interpreters like gcc, Java, and python tested?”
  • “What are the pros/cons of <language feature>?”
  • “Compare and contrast <language feature> vs. <other feature>”
  • “Confused about the semantics of this language”
  • “Proceedings from PLDI / OOPSLA / ICFP / <other large programming conference>”

See /r/ProgrammingLanguages for specific examples

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