Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”

Awesome, thanks muchly, Bob! Reading and learning from "Crafting Interpreters" inspired four of my own fun projects (the first three on github.com/benhoyt): littlelang, my first little language interpreter, in Go; loxlox, a Lox interpreter written in Bob's Lox language; goawk, a full AWK interpreter written in Go; and my current unreleased project, a Turbo Pascal to Go converter with the goal of transpiling the reconstructed ZZT source to Go.

Wow. I was already impressed with the book, but after reading about what was happening behind the scenes, I'm truly in awe. I especially appreciate the work you put into making sure that the code snippets are accurate to the actual source code. Far too many books omit crucial steps or contain faulty code.

I also found it really heartening how you kept working through the tough times. We're all going through some challenging times right now and I have found that working on my projects (including a compiler!) has given me a small bit of satisfaction.

that's a fantastic read! thanks for sharing the process with us. really surprised that the code was complete the very first year and the real work was to put all that in writing, snippets, and illustrations.

> Writing this all out makes me sound like a crazy person. What the hell am I doing with my life? Or, more importantly, what could I have been doing instead of doing all that?

That's why your book is so good! Singular focus on one subject like this either causes insanity or genius.

Examples: redis, Linux, sqlite, dwarf fortress, etc. I (believe, not sure) all were started by a single person who was insane by any measure to start those projects, but they became something that people love.

If this is insanity, please keep going insane!

This book has been a big help to me - thanks!

> I liked the hand-drawn look. It furthered my meta-goal of making the material more approachable, more human. But I wanted to up the quality. I wanted them to be more intricate and contain more information. I wanted the drawings to be more detailed. Less margin doodles and more, well, illustrations. Maybe even some lowercase letters.

This is one of the most unusual aspects of the book, and something that immediately drew me to it. I'm curious how Nystrom hit on that idea, whether he experimented with vector graphics alternatives, and if so, what did he take away from those experiments.

The method described in the video looks extremely laborious. That said, the quality of the result speaks for itself.