This is called “bootstrapping”. You must first build a compiler (or interpreter) for your language in some other language (usually Java or C). Once that is done, you can write a new version of the compiler in language Foo. You use the first bootstrap compiler to compile the compiler, and then use this compiled compiler … Read more
A compiled language is one where the program, once compiled, is expressed in the instructions of the target machine. For example, an addition “+” operation in your source code could be translated directly to the “ADD” instruction in machine code. An interpreted language is one where the instructions are not directly executed by the target … Read more
These are undocumented implementation details of the compiler, and subject to change at any time. (UPDATE: See GeneratedNames.cs in the C# sources for the current details; the description below is somewhat out-of-date.) However, since I’m a nice guy, here are some of those details: If you have an unused local variable that the optimizer removes, … Read more
Ok, let’s build a simple math example. Building an AST is totally overkill for such a task but it’s a nice way to show the principle. I’ll do it in C# but the Java version would be very similar. The grammar First, let’s write a very basic math grammar to work with: grammar Math; compileUnit … Read more
A JIT compiler runs after the program has started and compiles the code (usually bytecode or some kind of VM instructions) on the fly (or just-in-time, as it’s called) into a form that’s usually faster, typically the host CPU’s native instruction set. A JIT has access to dynamic runtime information whereas a standard compiler doesn’t … Read more
One easy way to understand “ABI” is to compare it to “API”. You are already familiar with the concept of an API. If you want to use the features of, say, some library or your OS, you will program against an API. The API consists of data types/structures, constants, functions, etc that you can use … Read more
I’ve been building tools (DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit) to do general purpose program manipulation (with language translation being a special case) since 1995, supported by a strong team of computer scientists. DMS provides generic parsing, AST building, symbol tables, control and data flow analysis, application of translation rules, regeneration of source text with comments, etc., … Read more
The problem of converting an AST back into source code is generally called “prettyprinting”. There are two subtle variations: regenerating the text matching the original as much as possible (I call this “fidelity printing”), and (nice) prettyprinting, which generates nicely formatted text. And how you print matters depending on whether coders will be working on … Read more
Where your statics go depends on whether they are zero-initialized. zero-initialized static data goes in .BSS (Block Started by Symbol), non-zero-initialized data goes in .DATA
Learning to write a compiler [closed]