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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • I’ve been following the book Crafting Interpreters which makes a language slightly similar to lua but with bracketed blocks and other small changes. This is a stack based interpreter which feels like a great place to start. There’s also register based which seems to use more of a word code to bytecode approach but couldn’t tell you much else the differences. I’d highly recommend building an interpreter first as this is a virtual machine and you can make your own fake assembly with less consequences. Writing a real native code compiler is a lot harder if you don’t have that baseline under your belt, but you do you if you’re confident in your knowhow!

    I guess the biggest takeaway i’ve come across is you can make functions without too much headache, but closures are much harder, you need to move local variables off the stack and onto the heap. Not sure how register handles it


  • High level folks complain it takes too long to code in and is hard to understand the borrow checker. Low level folks complain it takes too long to code in and is hard to understand the borrow checker. Honestly though the borrow checker is a great compromise to idiot proof memory leak prevention, and the C folks can just throw in unsafe when they want start slinging pointers and manual heap management. The macro system alone is so good I don’t think it’s fair to appraise the language until you’ve written a dozen macros