babel-handbook VS picoc

For more information about building Babel plugins, check the Kent's Babel Handbook or this awesome Babel handbook by Jamie.

Babel does this by compiling down JavaScript code written with the latest standards into a version that will work everywhere today. This process is known as source-to-source compiling, also known as transpiring. Source: Jamie Kyle

I'll be honest, my approach to getting used to working with ASTs is a bit weird, but it worked for me. For some reason the thought of working with the TypeScript AST sounds really attractive to me. I'm sure most people recommend to start deep diving into babel first before getting used to working with an AST with the TypeScript compiler, but I started it the other way around. There is a great library called ts-morph that focuses on making it easier for developers to work with the TypeScript compiler. Learning hands on with ts-morph while getting used to their compiler api made babel much easier to understand without ever touching babel.

Those videos gave me a base for the task but I needed more sources to achieve it, so I read a lot of source code for other libraries built with babel-plugin-macros, read the plugin's authoring documentation and Jamie Kyle's Babel Handbook.

If you want to learn more about parsing, reading the code of an actual recursive parser might be a better idea. Esprima is a decent place to start if you're interested in JS grammar. Then you can look at the babel handbook to learn more about AST transformations. From there, the literature gets quite a bit more heavy. If you get this far and are willing to push further, you'll probably want to grab yourself a copy of the dragon book at a minimum.

Babel handbook

and picoc, but it also features interactive shell

I would like to try this C REPL: https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc

You can. People have written an interpreter for C, and you could write a compiler for Python.

Yeah, I would not choose to learn the C-shell simply because it shares a letter with the compiled language. You might be better served learning Pike or PicoC.

But don't get caught up in the VM definition, the whole act of compiling to VM bytecode and then to native is just another step in the chain. For example here is a C interpreter that lets you do the same thing, without intermediate bytecode.

Can we please cut the bullshit. By that logic no language is compiled. Because behold, a C interpreter: https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc

Languages can have a compiler, an interpreter, or both. Just because a language is commonly thought of as 'compiled' doesn't mean you can't write an interpreter for it, or vice versa. There's even C interpreters for crying out loud https://github.com/jpoirier/picoc .