Show HN: Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages

Post by krat0sprakhar » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 3:19 AM UTC

harpocrates wrote: post #25

jnbiche wrote: post #6

Another great-looking book on making dynamic languages. There's been some good ones recently, and this one looks like another good one covering how to make a basic, interpreted language. Some of us have written 1 or 2 dynamic, interpreted languages, feel pretty comfortable with those concepts, and are interested in transiting to more advanced, static type systems and writing a good type checker. Anyone up for writing…

Writing a type-checker is fun and pretty interesting. For that, I recommend you get acquainted with formal semantics and judgements (that's just the language for describing type-systems). You'll probably be interested in then looking up * simply typed lambda calculus * Hindley-Milner type inference * bidirectional typing After that, there are all sorts of cool things like linear/affine types, system F, dependent type…

Post by PeCaN » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 4:42 AM UTC

inconclusive wrote: post #16

jnbiche wrote: post #6

Another great-looking book on making dynamic languages. There's been some good ones recently, and this one looks like another good one covering how to make a basic, interpreted language. Some of us have written 1 or 2 dynamic, interpreted languages, feel pretty comfortable with those concepts, and are interested in transiting to more advanced, static type systems and writing a good type checker. Anyone up for writing…

> more advanced, static type systems Are static type systems more advanced than dynamic type systems? This sounds surprising, given how much more one can do with a dynamic type system.

Post by munificent » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 6:05 AM UTC

d0m wrote: post #34

One question here for the more advanced compiler writers.. How do you go about writing a "pre-lexer" for LISP like language where you want to expand sexpr? I.e. Does the lexer even see `(...), or does it get pre-extracted to (quote ..)? And if so, how does the pre-extraction work exactly? Is it built using regex..? That can be tricky.

Post by kazinator » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 7:28 AM UTC

d0m wrote: post #34

One question here for the more advanced compiler writers.. How do you go about writing a "pre-lexer" for LISP like language where you want to expand sexpr? I.e. Does the lexer even see `(...), or does it get pre-extracted to (quote ..)? And if so, how does the pre-extraction work exactly? Is it built using regex..? That can be tricky.

Post by Flow » Mon, Jan 16, 2017, 8:08 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #23

ioddly wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For making an efficient Scheme implementation: most everything written by R. Kent Dybvig or his students. I'd start with his PHd thesis (Three Implementation Models for Scheme, specifically the stack-based part). http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/ (See also Lua's upvalues for a way to optimize closure variable access that's a bit simpler than his display closures).

> See also Lua's upvalues for a way to optimize closure variable access Yes! In fact, that's how the C version of the interpreter in my book implements closures. It's pretty brilliant. <3 those Lua folks.