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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By : Daniel Ruoso
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Building Programming Language Interpreters

Building Programming Language Interpreters

By: Daniel Ruoso

Overview of this book

Designing a custom programming language can be the most effective way to solve certain types of problems—especially when precision, safety, or domain-specific expressiveness matters. This book guides you through the full process of designing and implementing your own programming language and interpreter, from language design to execution, using modern C++. You’ll start by exploring when and why building a domain-specific language is worth it, and how to design one to fit a specific problem domain. Along the way, you’ll examine real-world interpreter architectures and see how their design decisions affect language behavior, capabilities, and runtime trade-offs. The book then walks through the entire process of interpreter implementation: defining syntax, building a lexer and parser, designing an abstract syntax tree, generating executable instructions, and implementing a runtime. All examples are in modern C++, with a focus on clean architecture and real-world usability. By the end, you’ll have a fully working interpreter for a domain-specific language designed to handle network protocols—plus the knowledge and tools to design your own programming language from scratch. *Email sign-up and proof of purchase required
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
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1
Modeling the Programming Language Runtime Environment
7
Modeling the Programming Language Syntax
12
Implementing the Interpreter Runtime
16
Interpreting Source Code
24
Index

Putting It All Together: Making Trade-Off Decisions

In this chapter, we will focus on getting a final design for the interpreter for our custom programming language by pulling all the discussions from the previous chapters into a coherent vision.

We will look at the different trade-off decisions we have to make and the reasoning behind the specific choices being made. More specifically, we will focus on the following:

  • The way in which the interpreter will integrate with existing code and allow the use of existing I/O libraries
  • The specific choices to enable concurrency in the use of the interpreter
  • Finalizing the memory model and the execution model of the interpreter into a coherent form

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to use the design decisions and trade-offs I walked through here when thinking about the design of your own interpreter.

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Tech Concepts
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Programming languages
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Building Programming Language Interpreters
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