BuildYourOwnLisp VS the-super-tiny-compiler

Build Your Own Lisp

Create your own meta-circular evaluator: https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

If you still want to produce a toy project in C I would suggest to build your own LISP ;-)

Build your own Lisp is cool but offloads the language grammar and the parsing to the author's mpc library, this is already way overkill for what I'd like to do.

Lisps are also a good language if you want to know how languages work. They are very easy to make an interpreter for. There are good tutorials for that at https://github.com/kanaka/mal and https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/.

Anyone have any input on:

https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

It's been in my bookmarks for a long time but I've never really had time to really start it. The "who is this for" page say:

"This book is for anyone wanting to learn C, or who has once wondered how to build their own programming language.".

Well, I'm fairly competent in C (but not great) but would like to get a glimpse of what it's like to build my own language. Is it worth the time?

Now, those concepts are a whole entire world to explore, and this is out of the scope of this article. I suggest the reading of the Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of the book Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom for a wider (but still practical) understanding of those subjects. Another practical great resource to look at is The SuperTiny Compiler. To explore them from a theorical point of view, you can find A LOT of resources from books or courses online.

The super tiny compiler by Jamie

I am currently writing a much more intricate version of the Super Tiny Compiler (https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler) in Rust, only I plan on handling many basic operations, essentially a compiler for a MUCH simpler version of Go. Great project idea btw, for anyone who wants to explore compilers. But in doing so, have really found a new respect for just what is going on when you gcc -o garbageprogram mytrashcode.c

You could start here:

https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler

That converts from lisp-like to javascript. Really though this is a big field, and there are lots of resources out there.

To get started look at your input language; you'll need to lex and parse that. Then massage the parsed structure into the appropriate output.

You can see me convert brainfuck to C, or x86 assembly language here:

https://github.com/skx/bfcc

I think this is more or less what you’re looking for https://github.com/jamiebuilds/the-super-tiny-compiler . He builds a small compiler for a lisp like syntax that only support a handful of operations. I have not gone through it myself but I think total is about 200 lines which can be just enough for the type of project you have.

JavaScript: The Super Tiny Compiler

the-super-tiny-compiler. Compiler implemented in JS, that translates a small subset of Lisp to C-ish like syntax