I Wrote a Compiler

https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2021-01-31-i-wrote-a-compiler/

59•ingve•2d ago

Comments

TMWNN•6h ago

I thought a compiler, with no adjective or caveat, should turn a HLL into machine language. Isn't what this describes—turning BASIC into Go—more accurately described as a "pseudocompiler" or "Go compiler" or somesuch? I know Emacs is always said to have a "bytecode compiler" that processes Elisp code, not a "compiler" per se. Am I mistaken?

pxc•6h ago

The standard term for this kind of compiler is "transpiler", afaik.

Here's the Wikipedia page for such things, which also taught me several other names for them:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler

kragen•2h ago

The standard term for "transpiler" is "compiler", though.

ratmice•6h ago

So, if he had invoked go for you would it be a compiler? Another definition is that it translates a source language into a target language.

meisel•6h ago

What would you call TypeScript’s tsc, which translates TS to JS? Microsoft would say it’s a compiler: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/typescript/typescript-com...

andsoitis•1h ago

They do, but that article also mixes “transpile” and “compile” often enough that it is near impossible to deduce what different meanings they might ascribe.

fao_•6h ago

Strictly speaking it's a transpiler, but honestly the delta between the target language (Go) and the source language (BASIC) is very fluffy and wooly, from what I remember from my PL theory days the distinction was always fuzzy enough that people used whatever term felt right to them.

An example off the top of my head — Chicken Scheme (call-cc.org) calls itself a compiler but it's target language is C

tuveson•4h ago

This kind of question winds up being the CS equivalent of “is a hotdog a sandwich”. I agree that transpiler is a more accurate term for it and that a hotdog is not a sandwich. But there are lots of languages that start life as compile-to-C things. Many compiled languages today output LLVM IR which is not machine language. Similarly people would probably call javac a compiler, even though it outputs bytecode.

npalli•6h ago

>The original authors of yacc were Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt - yes that Eric Schmidt.

Incorrect, they were authors of lex. yacc was authored by Stephen Johnson.

Surprising to me is all the authors are still around, even though the tools are over 50 years old!. Shows how young computer science field is.

musicale•2h ago

Who coauthored "The C Programming Language" anyway? Oh right, prof. Kernighan.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

tapirl•22m ago

> ... yes that Eric Schmidt.

Not the one who was ever Google's CEO. right?

bastawhiz•6h ago

>The original authors of yacc were Mike Lesk and Eric Schmidt - yes that Eric Schmidt.

I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but the author of the post is David Singleton, the former CTO of Stripe. I almost hadn't noticed until I saw the domain.

refulgentis•5h ago

I worked ~4 layers underneath him when he led Android Wear at Google, and every year or two that happens to me, and it puts a smile on my face. Gotta have love of the game to do this at that level.

IIRC, and man, maybe I'm making it up, but, lore was he always made time on a regular schedule to hack.

Usually 1 layer from the bottom isn't coding so much anymore.

(oddly, I didn't realize he was *CTO* of Stripe until a few months back, when his new thing with Hugo Barra was announced)

azhenley•5h ago

TinyBASIC is fun and beautifully simple. I wrote a 3-part tutorial for making a TinyBASIC-to-C compiler using Python a few years ago.

Let’s make a Teeny Tiny compiler https://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

tuveson•4h ago

I know BASIC is kind of a “bad” language, but there’s something so delightful about it. If we’re plugging TinyBASIC projects that others might find interesting, I made an MMO TinyBASIC REPL the other day: http://10klob.com/

musicale•1h ago

BASIC is an amazing language that computing novices (including humanities majors) could learn in an afternoon, that could be efficiently compiled or compactly interpreted, that was small enough to support dozens of interactive users on a mainframe or minicomputer, or to fit into a tiny 8-bit microcomputer – and yet was largely equivalent to FORTRAN in terms of its expressive power.

I think the closest modern equivalents might be Python (for easy onramp and scalability from microcontrollers to supercomputers) and JavaScript (for pure ubiquity in every device with a web browser.)

I wonder if there is a modern-ish (?) environment that can match Visual BASIC in terms of easy GUI app programming. Perhaps Python or Tcl with Tk (Qt seems harder) or maybe Delphi, or perhaps a modern Smalltalk.

andsoitis•1h ago

Delphi for sure. And while you have to run it on Windows, it can create binaries for Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

pjmlp•49m ago

Delphi, and naturally Visual Basic for .NET with Windows Forms, not forgeting about C#, however it is getting a bit too much featurities lately, and most likely not what the BASIC target audience would like.

pjmlp•49m ago

People too often complain about original BASIC, and forget most dialects moved away from line numbers and spaghetti GOTOs during the 16 bit days, with widepsread of compilers and structured constructs.

I am really glad that I only got to learn C, after getting through Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, Turbo Pascal[0], doing exactly the same kind of stuff urban myths say it was only possible after C came to be.

[0] - On 16 bit systems, I started coding on an 8bit Timex 2068.

matthewmueller•4h ago

Love reading these. Keep these blog posts coming!

WoodenChair•2h ago

This is very similar to the project I have in Chapter 2 of my new book Computer Science from Scratch [0]. It's also Tiny BASIC without INPUT. I called it NanoBASIC. But it's an interpreter not a compiler. This tutorial is a nice starting point. The chapter is much more comprehensive, so if you want to get into the weeds, I can recommend my own chapter (of course). But it's in Python, not Go. The code is on GitHub[1]. But this tutorial is great too.

0: https://nostarch.com/computer-science-from-scratch

1: https://github.com/davecom/ComputerScienceFromScratch

musicale•2h ago

> Yes, this is what I do for fun.

Don't we all? ;-)

teo_zero•1h ago

Wait! What are == and != doing in a BASIC language? Heresy! :)

dps•55m ago

Yeah, I really should have included <> :-)

Fun to see this post from the deep archive get some interest - thanks for reading!

fjfaase•1h ago

Since 1990, I have developed software with C and later C++. Now that I am working on a C compiler, I am learning new things about the language. So, writing a compiler (or an interpretter) can really help to get a deep understanding of a programming language.

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