About Crafting Interpreters
Crafting Interpreters is a book by Robert Nystrom about how programming languages are designed and built. You build a complete scripting language yourself, one part at a time.
What it does
The book covers high-level ideas about parsing and semantics, along with lower-level details such as bytecode and garbage collection. The language you build supports dynamic typing, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes and inheritance. The code stays short and readable, at a few thousand lines in total.
Key features
- Build a scripting language from the first line
- Parsing and language semantics explained
- Bytecode and garbage collection covered
- Closures, classes and inheritance included
- Full text available to read on the web
Who it's for
Programmers who want to understand how interpreters and compilers work. Anyone who wants to build a language of their own, and students who are learning language design.
Pricing and good to know
The web version is free to read, with the whole book available online. Print and ebook editions are sold separately, and the author offers a sample PDF to try first. Expect to spend time on it, since you write each part of the code yourself.
Highlights
- Build a scripting language from the first line
- Parsing and language semantics explained
- Bytecode and garbage collection covered
- Closures, classes and inheritance included
- Full text available to read on the web
