Same, it usually whacked about half the attempted majors into another major. In the first half of senior year. They kept wondering why their program wasn’t growing much even though similar colleges’ programs were growing like mold on a dorm shower curtain. I enjoyed the course and never used the primary skills taught in it again.
It really depends on what you do, but somehow, I actually did end up using some of the things those courses were teaching. It turns out the visitor pattern is extremely useful for writing JavaScript code transformers.
I definitely read this as you were a third year French major being forced to taking a compiler course for a moment and went wtf. Then my brain slapped itself and realized you mean you’re a student in France.
Haha yeah I meant that I was studying computer science im France and not studying french. Here in France, bachelor are called licence and are only 3 years compared to 4 in north america afaik, but there are way fewer electives
Compilers are a specialized topic - and syntax design is fiddly - but it really is no harder than any other sort of program. A lot of the hard theoretical work was done back in the sixties and seventies. You don’t have to start from scratch. These days it’s “only” a matter of implementing the features you want and making sure your syntax doesn’t leave itself open to multiple interpretations. (just as arithmetic, e.g. ‘5 × 4 - 1’ requires some rules to make sure there’s only one correct interpretation, so do language syntaxes need to be unambiguous to parse. )
Don’t get me wrong - writing a language is a lot of work and it’s super cool that OP has done this! I just want to stress that language development is 100% doable with an undergrad degree. If you understand recursion and how to parse a string you already have all the theory you need to get started.
Valuable input! I actually am an undergrad student. There are a lot of frameworks out there that support writing languages, with MPS being one of them.
If I’d start from scratch again and had a little more time, I’d frankly try writing an interpreter myself, instead of trying to conform to weird framework syntax, which I won’t be able to reuse in any other context.
Saying syntax design is fiddly is an understatement. I focused very hard on getting an abstract syntax somehow finished before working on generation in my first iteration. Then I had so much technical debt, that I couldn’t get anything to work and had to rewrite a lot. So I scrapped it all and started again, starting with top level concepts including generation and only implementing some lower level ones, once everything around it worked properly.
It’s likely transpiring and not compiling, so it’s a lot easier than it seems. Source: made a language that adds features to Python and transpiles to valid Python.
It doesn’t compile or transpile in actuality. It generates Java based on an abstract syntax tree. The concrete syntax is not considered in Java generation by MPS.
You’re correct, but it doesn’t really matter for demo purposes. In an actual use case (whatever that would be for this language) you would of course want to use some kind of variable or expression there instead of a constant.
Very cool, I’d be interested in your publications once you’re done. I like metaprogramming, but once you realise you might have needed it, you’re already knee deep in fresh legacy code.
You essential have a compiler written through metaprogramming. For your implementation, did you use a find and replace or did you define and parse a grammar like a true compiler.
MPS uses projectional editing. Which means for the user that everything you do is free from concrete syntax, and you basically edit a graphical representation of that abstract syntax tree directly, while it looks like you’re in a textual editor.
So I define abstract nodes that may have certain relationships with each other and then give them a representation in the editor (which is what you see in the screenshot). These nodes may also have generators assigned to them, which use map/reduce operations to generate whatever source code I desire. It usually includes its own bit of code, and triggers code generation of its children as well.
Does it compile into JVM bytecode or Java source code?
JVM bytecode is one of the most infuriating IRs I ever had the displeasure to work with, and if you managed to make a compiler for that, I applaud you.
Fortunately I generate Java source code from it. However MPS generates both source and byte code when you build the solution. For some reason I can’t get the byte code to run though, but the source code does, so I don’t care too much.
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