The first step in most programming languages is lexing, or tokenizing. This will all become clear as we go through the Pinecone pipeline step by step. The final stage is something that can be run. The first stage is a string containing the entire input source file. It also has functions to transform data from each stage to the next. Each stage has data formatted in a specific, well defined way. High Level DesignĪ programming language is generally structured as a pipeline. Compile time may be bad, but in my opinion that isn’t nearly as big a deal as bad run time. If you plan to compile, a slower language (like Python or JavaScript) is more acceptable. If you are writing an interpreted language, it makes a lot of sense to write it in a compiled one (like C, C++ or Swift) because the performance lost in the language of your interpreter and the interpreter that is interpreting your interpreter will compound. Also, I actually do enjoy working in C++. I chose C++ because of its performance and large feature set. I know it’s a bit meta, but a programming language is itself a program, and thus you need to write it in a language. There are a number of reasons for this, which I will explain later on. This was an important decision to make early on, because a lot of language design decisions are affected by it (for example, static typing is a big benefit to compiled languages, but not so much for interpreted ones).ĭespite the fact that Pinecone was designed with compiling in mind, it does have a fully functional interpreter which was the only way to run it for a while. I highly value performance, and I saw a lack of programming languages that are both high performance and simplicity-oriented, so I went with compiled for Pinecone. But this is only scratching the surface of a very complex topic. Generally, interpreting tends to be more flexible, while compiling tends to have higher performance. Technically any language could be compiled or interpreted, but one or the other usually makes more sense for a specific language. An interpreter steps through the source code line by line, figuring out what it’s doing as it goes.A compiler figures out everything a program will do, turns it into “machine code” (a format the computer can run really fast), then saves that to be executed later.There are two major types of languages: compiled and interpreted: In case that’s your reaction, I’ll now go through some initial decisions that are made and steps that are taken when starting any new language. “I have absolutely no idea where I would even start” is something I hear a lot when I tell other developers I’m writing a language. This is by no means a complete tutorial on writing a programming language, but it’s a good starting point if you’re curious about language development. I‘ll also touch on some of the tradeoffs I’ve had make, and why I made the decisions I did. In this post, I’ll dive under the hood and show you the pipeline Pinecone (and other programming languages) use to turn source code into magic. I’ve taken zero classes on language creation, read only a bit about it online, and did not follow much of the advice I have been given.Īnd yet, I still made a completely new language. When I started this project, I had no clue what I was doing, and I still don’t. If you’re interested in it, check out Pinecone’s landing page or its GitHub repo. I wouldn’t call it mature yet, but it already has enough features working to be usable, such as: Over the past 6 months, I’ve been working on a programming language called Pinecone. By William W Wold I wrote a programming language.
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