rust-gc VS Crafting Interpreters

rust-langdev has a lot of libraries for building compilers in Rust. Perhaps you could use these to make your implementation easier, and revisit it later if you want to build things from scratch. I'd suggest logos for lexing, LALRPOP / chumsky for parsing, and rust-gc for garbage collection.

There's nothing stopping you from doing that in Rust. See rust-gc for an example of a GC implemented in Rust. Another example is mozjs, which is Rust bindings to SpiderMonkey. The GC there is implemented in C++, but it shows how you'd structure wrapper types for GC'd pointers in Rust so that you can use them safely, even with all the "ugliness" of a browser-grade GC.

One can have a GC as a library, https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

The ones I am aware of are gc and broom. None will be as simple to use as the one in old Rust as userland implementations don't have the benefit of first-class integrated compiler support.

Rust has rust-gc, which is an attempt to add opt-in GC over Rust's more traditional automatic memory management. It's a neat project, but I'm not sure where it's actually being used.

Inb4 "already exists": the question is about making it convenient, not just imlementing the behavior.

There is also a library implementation of garbage collection for Rust, made by someone from the Rust core team.

Yep! And I'd actually fully agree those are garbage collection, there's also a crate by Manish which does """real""" garbage collection—https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

I don't know that I'd say it "works" - it's never a technique I've needed to use myself, but it's the approach taken by e.g. https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc

Anyway, I found something recent that implements "rc" but in terms of tracing: https://github.com/Manishearth/rust-gc/ . Maybe useful for projects involving graphs of objects.

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.