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’ve been following the book Crafting Interpreters which makes a language slightly similar to lua but with bracketed blocks and other small changes. This is a stack based interpreter which feels like a great place to start. There’s also register based which seems to use more of a word code to bytecode approach but couldn’t tell you much else the differences. I’d highly recommend building an interpreter first as this is a virtual machine and you can make your own fake assembly with less consequences. Writing a real native code compiler is a lot harder if you don’t have that baseline under your belt, but you do you if you’re confident in your knowhow!
I guess the biggest takeaway i’ve come across is you can make functions without too much headache, but closures are much harder, you need to move local variables off the stack and onto the heap. Not sure how register handles it