Chapter 1: Project Architecture and Workflow
Creating a programming language involves several key stages:
High-level code authoring
Compilation to intermediate representation (IR)
Assembly into machine code
File loading
Linking of external dependencies
Final object file generation
Our current focus is on the compiler phase, often considered the most complex part of the language implementation process.We will tackle other parts later in the series
Compiler Pipeline
The compiler consists of two main components: the frontend and the backend.
Frontend:
Lexical Analysis: Tokenization of the source code
Parsing: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) generation from tokens
Backend:
Intermediate Representation (IR) Generation: Creating a machine-independent code representation
Code Generation: Producing target-specific assembly from the IR
In subsequent chapters, we'll dive deeper into each of these stages, exploring their roles in the language development process and examining specific implementation details.
Key Concepts and Technologies
Throughout this series, we'll encounter several important concepts and tools:
Lexical Analysis: The process of converting a sequence of characters into a sequence of tokens.
Abstract Syntax Tree (AST): A tree representation of the abstract syntactic structure of source code.
Intermediate Representation (IR): A data structure or code used internally by a compiler to represent source code.
LLVM: A collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.
While we'll explain these concepts as we go, familiarity with basic programming concepts and language theory will be beneficial.
The terms used will be discussed in detail while implementing them
Stay tuned for the next chapter, where we'll start implementing the Development phase