Can you tell me a bit about your background and your journey towards writing WASM, and learning to write a complier? (for context I never took a compiler course, vaguely know what lex and yacc are)
If you want to create a language that can run in browsers, you either need to target js or wasm. Wasm seemed like the better fit (i’m done with 53-bit ints), so I googled everything on that.
Read a book on GC (wasm has no such thing built in), read two books on Forth (after being intruiged by its syntax), Learned about compilers by looking at Elm source code.
I guess I’ve been around so many languages that it’s impossible not to form an oppi ion on what makes a good language, so once I knew the basics it was difficult to avoid making my own.
It is a rather restricted and "high level" language and has a nice, human readable, s-expression text format (WAT). For example it is perfectly reasonable to write WAT by hand after learning the basics.
Also there is plenty of fantastic, modern documentation, tooling and specification around WASM.