The programming languages you’ve been using actually build upon the ideas present in older languages that you may not have have heard of. Diving further into programming language theory, you read about the language constructs present - Java and Python are object-oriented programming languages and Python and JavaScript are dynamically-typed. Java and Python have objects, Python and JavaScript don’t require you to write types, the list goes on. Using more programming languages, you realise that the languages share common themes. Fast forward to your second language, and it seems hard, you have to relearn syntax and this new language does things differently. See, when you learn your first programming language, you view programming through the lens of that language. Whilst all three of these (or none!) might be true, there’s a bigger motivation: having the right mental models. It’s cool to have your own programming language.The question we should really be asking is why design your own language? Possible answers: Why should you write your own programming language? The remainder of this post will be to convince you why writing your own programming language is worthwhile, and the next post will outline the structure of a compiler. So I’d encourage you to follow the links in the “Series” overview to learn about these specific features. Compiling to LLVM (this post was #2 on Hacker News!) - LLVM is used by C, C++, Swift, Rust amongst many other languages.An introduction to how types are checked in a compiler.Generics: being able to write a class of type LinkedList and then instantiating it with LinkedList, LinkedList and so on.Concurrency (as far as I could tell when writing this, no other programming language tutorial covered this).We implement objects and classes, with inheritance and method overriding.The language Bolt I wrote as part of my third year disseration is a Java-style concurrent object-oriented language. One of the gripes I had when seeing programming language tutorials that created a toy language with only operations like addition and multiplication, was: okay, but what about a real language like Java? In this series of posts we’ll be building a proper programming language. When I started this project 6 months ago, I had never built a compiler, nor had I used OCaml or C++ in any serious project. What do all the stages mean? I have to learn OCaml and C++? Wait I haven’t even heard of OCaml…ĭon’t worry.
The diagram above is the compiler for the language Bolt we’ll be building. Part 11: Adding Inheritance and Method Overriding to Our Language
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