mal VS Crafting Interpreters

>Would be interesting to see how the interpreter works actually...

It's quite easy to see, there are interpeters for Lisp in like 20 lines or so.

Here's a good one:

https://norvig.com/lispy.html

(It has the full code in a link towards the bottom)

There's also this:

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Here is one implementation of a lisp (mal specifically) in matlab: https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/dcf8f4d7b9cf7b858850a04a0...

Only 260 lines of code, pretty concise :)

have a look at the crafting interpreters book, plus make a lisp (lisp is a great first language to make a compiler/interpreter for, just google "lisp compiler/interpreter" and you'll find lots of resources)

If you're really okay with the limitations of a tree-walk interpreter, you might want to check out MAL, which will teach you how to write a tree-walk interpreter for a LISP. The code for MAL has been translated to most popular languages, so you can work through the creation of an interpreter in the language of your choice. JLox would give you a bit more detail and a more complex language, but I'm not convinced that it's all that important.

Write a small programming language (lisp (https://github.com/kanaka/mal) or brainfuck) in C++ to learn the syntax more. This will teach you a lot about programming languages in general.

So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes

So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.

Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

Hijacking the top comment to add https://buildyourownlisp.com and https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Build an Interpreter (Chapter 14 on is written in C)

I’m guessing you’ll have to work with the scopes in the resolver:

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/blob/mast...

Better open an issue/request wiki edit at https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/wiki/Lox-implementations

I'm late to the party, but I want to say thank you for sharing this. It's inspiring to look at how much you've built and (hopefully) enjoyed the process of building! I'm loving everything -- your site, your language design, your docs, your builtin libraries, your dev tools. Beyond impressive. People like you are the ones who make HN one of my best places on the internet.

For context on where I'm coming from, about two weeks ago I picked up Crafting Interpreters [1] for fun. I'm finding your clear-yet-concise Compiler internals [2] to be particularly compelling reading, and jumping back and forth between those "how this all works" docs and the live example of this language you actually built do a WASM-compiled tree-blowing-in-the-wind animation is just... just wow. So freaking cool!

I also enjoyed reading the comment thread that inspired you to start on Yaksha and seeing how this project has a wholesome start as inspiration-by-programming-hero. I hope you recognize that a few years later you've now ascended from inspiree to inspirer. I also hope you're still having tons of fun building out Yaksha!

[1] https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/

[2] https://yakshalang.github.io/documentation.html#compiler-int...

There are books which will talk you through the process. Crafting Interpreters is highly spoken of; I used Writing an Interpreter in Go, because I like Go. Then there's Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (the "Dragon Book"). This is considered heavy, but a classic, it's been around since '86.

I cannot recommend Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom enough, it covers a lot of the stuff you need to know, completely for free.

Crafting Interpreters is a fun primer on language design. It has a complete roadmap to build a fairly simple language, twice. There are some topics it won't touch on, like static type systems, but it provides a great introduction so that you can start tinkering and learn by doing.