E-book details

Build Your Own Programming Language. A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for solving modern computing problems

Build Your Own Programming Language. A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for solving modern computing problems

Clinton L. Jeffery

Ebook
The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software.
In this book, you’ll start with implementing the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you’ll learn how domain-specific language features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. We’ll conclude with how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts where relevant examples are provided in both Unicon and Java so that you can follow the code of your choice of either a very high-level language with advanced features, or a mainstream language.
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs.
  • 1. Why Build Another Programming Language
  • 2. Programming Language Design
  • 3. Scanning Source Code
  • 4. Parsing
  • 5. Syntax Trees
  • 6. Symbol Tables
  • 7. Checking Base Types
  • 8. Checking Types on Arrays, Method Calls, and Structure Accesses
  • 9. Intermediate Code Generation
  • 10. Syntax Cloning in an IDE
  • 11. Bytecode Interpreters
  • 12. Generating Bytecode
  • 13. Native Code Generation
  • 14. Implementing Operators and Built-In Functions
  • 15. Domain Control Structures
  • 16. Garbage Collection
  • 17. Final Thoughts
  • 18. Appendix A - Unicon Essentials
  • Title: Build Your Own Programming Language. A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for solving modern computing problems
  • Author: Clinton L. Jeffery
  • Original title: Build Your Own Programming Language. A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs for solving modern computing problems
  • ISBN: 9781800200333, 9781800200333
  • Date of issue: 2021-12-31
  • Format: Ebook
  • Item ID: e_2t54
  • Publisher: Packt Publishing