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Crafting Interpreters

craftinginterpreters.com

115 pointstambourine_man24 comments

absolute gem of a book, I use it for my compilers class:

recursive descent parsing is simple, beautiful, intuitive, flexible, shows the correspondence between recursion and grammars and it's how most production compilers are built

this book is the best (and one of the only) books to cover it in depth

it belongs on every programmers shelf

I love your site :D

it made me smile

Is that page increasing with new content?

Anyway, recursive parsers are too resource hungry to run on a PDP-11. That's why nobody teaches them. If you don't expect them to run on a PDP-11, then yes, all of that is true.

(Our academic institutions are stuck at the 70's, while our commercial institutions are stuck ignoring anything that is more than 10 years old. It's hard to train new developers on those conditions.)

One of the many things I miss about working at Basho: the engineers had a deep respect for the academic underpinnings of distributed systems. Leslie Lamport might as well have been a former employee considering how much we talked about, and leveraged, his work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34410776

> best weapon against complexity spirit demon is magic word: "no"

This is going up on every vertical surface at the office.

What’s your opinion on parsing generators, though? One advantage of them is that they give a specification of the grammar as well.

from the site:

> unfortunately many big brain school teach only parser generator tool. here grug usual love of tool is not: parser generator tool generate code of awful snakes nest: impossible understand, bottom up, what? hide recursive nature of grammar from grug and debug impossible, very bad according grug!

Depending on your language, creating a grammar and then creating a recursive descent parser based on it is a perfectly reasonable approach, and that's what most major programming languages do.

For experimental stuff like https://hyperscript.org I wing it a bit more, but that's the flavor of that language.

Loved the book. Inspired me to create my own language (definitely not a copy, though), and put the whole experience on YouTube. (Playlist link in my profile.) Technically, I had already written a language twice, but this book convinced me that it might be beneficial to do it again (and fix the things that I didn't like from the previous 2 incarnations) and put it out there for everyone else to see and hopefully benefit from.

The book was very well done, both in artwork, writing style, and explanations.

Author here! It's been so unbelievably gratifying seeing how many people this book resonates with.

It was my Christmas present this year and I'm enjoying it and learning a lot, thanks for your dedication!

Merry Christmas!

Thanks Bob, great book! Do you have any recommendations on going from learning about interpreters to learning about compilers, ie making a language go all the way from the high level to machine code / binary? I'm looking for something at the same level of quality as your book, which is to say, very high.

Going all the way to native code is hard. I would probably recommend both of:

* Compilers, Principles, and Tools (the Dragon Book)

* Engineering a Compiler

You can skim a lot of the Dragon Book, but it will introduce you to a lot of the basics around type checking and generating code. Then Engineering a Compiler (which roughly assumes you have some familiarity with compilers already) does a very good job of walking through all of the key algorithms behind control flow analysis, register allocation, instruction selection, optimization, etc.

Awesome, thank you!

There's also a new book out that might be worth a look that uses an incremental approach with Racket.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047760/essentials-of-compila...

To anyone interested we interviewed Bob recently [0] at Handmade Seattle: The Craft behind Crafting Interpreters

Great author but also a fun conversationalist :)

[0] https://guide.handmade-seattle.com/c/2022/behind-crafting-in...

I coded along with the code in the book and can really recommend it. It is well written and well explained.

I went through the first half in c# back around the time that part was finished. Need to go back and do part 2 which my current intent is do it with Rust. Probably means I skip implementing a bunch of the data structures stuff but that isn't my main interest so not a huge loss.

Writing An Interpreter In Go (https://interpreterbook.com) is also great.

Yes, Thorsten's books are great.

good to know. I think my bookshelf stopped growing circa Aho and Uhlman.

Aho, just learned about him from Unix Memoir book written by Kernighan. Awesome dude.

One of my all-time favorites. Highly recommended.

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