Crafting Interpreters (free web version) by Robert Nystrom is a great book about compiler construction. In this repository I'm working through the book, but instead of writing Part 1 in Java and Part 2 in C, I'll try to write both parts in Rust. I think this has some advantages:
- It prevents mindless copy-pasting and deepens understanding
- It natively chooses the "functional style" approach to the expression problem, as opposed to the Java implementation using the Visitor pattern
- Rust
Part 1 is just the language specification, nothing to program there.
Part 2 (the tree walk interpreter) is somewhat complete. You can run it or its test suite as follows.
cargo run [file.lox]
cargo testOn the same machine, it's about three times slower than the author's jlox implementation (after replacing the default HashMap with FxHashMap). I think this is fair, given that it has a simple object model with reference counting instead of decades of JVM optimizations under the hood.
My code is licensed under MIT. If any significant (i. e. large enough to not be covered as a quote) parts of the book end up here, I do not intend to unlawfully relicense them.
Please work through the material yourself. Fixing small or stylistic errors would be welcome though.