21–30 of 53 posts
Does Crafting Interpreters require preexisting C knowledge? I'm curious to follow the book, but my experience with X is beginner level at best.
Crafting interpreters is the best compiler/interpreter book I read. I had tried both the Dragon book and Andrew Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java" and Crafting Interpreters feels like a masterclass in how to write an accessible book. The author just has a special talent for explaining complex concepts simply.
I have a question about the book. I haven't been able to ask anyone else because I don't know anyone else who is working through the book. Is the first half of the book boring or is it just me? I wasn't really expecting the scanner/lexer to be interesting, but the interpreter part as well feels like an absolute slog. I started with a lot of enthusiasm but just couldn't keep going after implementing functions. I downl…
Crafting interpreters is the best compiler/interpreter book I read. I had tried both the Dragon book and Andrew Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java" and Crafting Interpreters feels like a masterclass in how to write an accessible book. The author just has a special talent for explaining complex concepts simply.
I have a question about the book. I haven't been able to ask anyone else because I don't know anyone else who is working through the book. Is the first half of the book boring or is it just me? I wasn't really expecting the scanner/lexer to be interesting, but the interpreter part as well feels like an absolute slog. I started with a lot of enthusiasm but just couldn't keep going after implementing functions. I downl…
You can do both overflow and underflow checks without any efficiently loss by using virtual memory page faults to "catch" the resulting access (which in any case is a fatal error).
A downside of Rust for applications like virtual machines is that it doesn't have a goto statement. Ideally, both a labelled and a computed goto would be available in the language.
Not only does it not have computed goto (almost no languages do, tbh), it also doesn't have guaranteed tall-call elimination or allow you to use the GHC calling convention. Which are more egregious, imo.
I had no idea about that. Is there a specific reason why that choice was made?
> I would often write huge refactorings thinking that they would be a solution to a borrow checker error, just to get another one at the end of the refactoring. Yeah this can often be a problem because the borrow checker doesn't kick in until the refactoring is done and no other errors are left.
It does take time and effort to really internalize these rules. But eventually you should be able to have a mental model of how ownership and borrowing work; consider what owns the data, if it can be borrowed within statically known scopes, will it need to mix sharing and mutation, and then apply Rust-specific types and design patterns to match.
Conversely, there are things that you just can't do, like using temporary references for parent-child relationships. Knowing this will save you time from even trying.
Perhaps learning materials need to be more explicit about it. For example, I suspect lots of people are discovering the limitation of self-referential structs the hard way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only does it not have computed goto (almost no languages do, tbh), it also doesn't have guaranteed tall-call elimination or allow you to use the GHC calling convention. Which are more egregious, imo.
I was looking for that (tail recursion) and it seems the story and feature request goes back years ago and still hasn't been added. Somewhere someone wrote that the issue is with LLVM but can't the tail call be transformed to an iteration before that?
The issue used to be with LLVM, yes, but that appears to be solved (see Clang's 'musttail' attribute). Instead it's more about language design. Constructors, destructors, and all of the fancy language features Rust has must work with this new feature, with no changes being visible elsewhere.
Does Crafting Interpreters require preexisting C knowledge? I'm curious to follow the book, but my experience with X is beginner level at best.
I’m curious about the extent to which DOS is a concern for an interpreter like this. I can see it be an issue if you’re exposing a service to external actors, but how big of a concern is it really in this context?
> While the clox compiler does prevent a lot of these cases, it does not prevent stack overflows. The author intentionally decided to skip this check because it would require a lot of boilerplate code. Real-world interpreters using unsafe structures like these must absolutely do it though. You can do both overflow and underflow checks without any efficiently loss by using virtual memory page faults to "catch" the res…