simplelanguage VS mal

That sort of stuff is easy to do with Truffle (which, ironically, lets you define a language using what they call the "truffle dsl").

The SimpleLanguage tutorial language has a bigint style number scheme with efficient optimization:

https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage/blob/master/langua...

Truffle has no opinion on how you parse the sources. It cares about how you execute them from an intermediate Truffle guided representation produced by the parser.

In other words antlr and truffle are a great fit. We even use this pairing for our example language simplelanguage.

https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

Do you have any feedback on how we could improve the docs? If so, please let us know!

I believe the easiest way to start a new Truffle language implementation is to fork SimpleLanguage [1] and turn it into your language. Did you try to do that?

[1] https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage

Finally, I would suggest you to take a look at the Truffle/GraalVM ecosystem(https://www.graalvm.org/graalvm-as-a-platform/language-implementation-framework/). The documentation is not exactly very elaborate, but a few good resources are Mumbler(http://cesquivias.github.io/blog/2014/10/13/writing-a-language-in-truffle-part-1-a-simple-slow-interpreter/#mumbler-language), SimpleLanguage(https://github.com/graalvm/simplelanguage), and (https://www.endoflineblog.com/graal-truffle-tutorial-part-4-parsing-and-the-trufflelanguage-class).

>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