Learning to build languages

Probably you are trying to learn building languages.

I have gone down that road some years ago.

Chances are that you, like me, having been frustrated by:

  • tutorials which are too theoretical: where is the code?
  • outdated resources: I am happy this used to work on a compiler of 20 years ago but it does not compile on my machine
  • no big picture: you find some tutorials on parsers and some of compilers but where are the resources giving you the whole map?

What resources you will find here

So I thought I could help by creating these resources:

  • a book: everything is ready for you to learn following a well organized plan so that you can focus on the real stuff: building great languages
  • a checklist of the 5 most important things to get right when building a language
  • a course: if you do not want to buy the book you can follow a series of posts which should help you getting started
  • tens of posts: will discuss all sort of topics related to building languages

Whichever path you pick these resources should help you getting started. If you feel something is missing or you do not know where to start from feel write to write at federico@tomassetti.me. I will do my best to help you.

Book: How to create pragmatic, lightweight languages

How to Create Pragmatic, Lightweight Languages

This book explains how to build languages. The goal here is to end up with something usable in practice. A real language, with an efficient parser and a complete compiler. A language with its own editor. This is not about building toys.

The approach described is based on reusing open-source components and organize them together to get something real with a limited effort. Do you think it is not possible to build a parser, an interpreter, an editor and a simulator in less than 1.000 lines of code? Think again.

When I was learning to build languages I was disappointed: I could just find basic tutorials here and there but what was missing was a complete course, organized to lead me from the very beginning to the end. Also, all approaches seemed so theoretical: a lot of words and not enough code.

Show me the book

Checklist: 5 things to get right when building a language

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Free course

You can find a course on building languages published as a series of posts

  1. Building a lexer
  2. Building a parser
  3. Creating an editor with syntax highlighting
  4. Build an editor with autocompletion
  5. Mapping the parse tree to the abstract syntax tree
  6. Model to model transformations
  7. Validation
  8. Generating bytecode

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