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.
I agree on avoiding on the idea of avoiding having to make your own parser generator, this is precisely what I’m doing and it’s hell. I assumed that you probably want to pick up some understanding on how parser differs when it come to writing grammars. As for ease of use and requiring the least understanding, using something like Earley parser is probably the easiest, it would be slower than other parser algorithms, but it could handle ambiguous grammars making it ideal for first timers to learn how to write a programming language.
I just default to recursive descent parsers (with pratt parsing), simple, efficient, great error messages and almighty (CFGs). For quick prototyping I really like to use https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky currently (pratt parsing was just added, need to try that out again).
But writing a parser generator is certainly an interesting academic task.