I want to make my programming language! …for fun.

I’ve been reading LLVM’s own tutorial, which is really good. I’m curious though, for those of you who have written your own languages before… What do you wish you had known before you set out?

In terms of previous experience, I have written a really basic lexer and parser for a non-executable markup language I designed. Now I’m curious about the next level. I have some ideas for a language design I’d like to try out. The language features themselves are nothing new - I’m sure some other language out there has done these things and done it better. That’s fine! I just want to better understand how all this stuff hangs together.

  • @philm
    2•11 months ago

    I just default to recursive descent parsers (with pratt parsing), simple, efficient, great error messages and almighty (CFGs). For quick prototyping I really like to use https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky currently (pratt parsing was just added, need to try that out again).

    But writing a parser generator is certainly an interesting academic task.

    • TheLinuxGuyEnglish
      0•11 months ago

      Very nice, I was basically forking off Python Lark and rewriting it in C language, with some adjustments to Earley Parser in an experiment to parallelize the processing in Vulkan Compute.