Build Your Own Programming Language: A programmer's guide to designing compilers, interpreters, and DSLs

Written by the creator of the Unicon programming language, this book will show you how to implement programming languages to reduce the time and cost of creating applications for new or specialized areas of computing.

Key Features

Reduce development time and solve pain points in your application domain by building a custom programming language

Learn how to create parsers, code generators, file readers, analyzers, and interpreters

Create an alternative to frameworks and libraries to solve domain-specific problems

Book Description

The need for different types of computer languages is growing rapidly and developers prefer creating domain-specific languages for solving specific application domain problems. Building your own programming language has its advantages. It can be your antidote to the ever-increasing size and complexity of software. However, creating a custom language isn't easy.

In this book, you'll be able to put the knowledge you gain to work in language design and implementation. You'll implement the frontend of a compiler for your language, including a lexical analyzer and parser. The book covers a series of traversals of syntax trees, culminating with code generation for a bytecode virtual machine. Moving ahead, you'll learn how domain-specific language (DSL) features are often best represented by operators and functions that are built into the language, rather than library functions. The book concludes by showing you how to implement garbage collection, including reference counting and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. Throughout the book, Dr. Jeffery weaves in his experience of building the Unicon programming language to give better context to the concepts, while providing relevant examples in Unicon and Java.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to build and deploy your own domain-specific languages, capable of compiling and running programs.