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Thank you for writing the book! I'm currently almost done with the first part (doing it in Haskell because why not) and every chapter I encounter situations where my "clever hack" turns out not to be so clever in the light of later requirements. It's been great fun so far. Have you considered writing up a follow-up book doing (say) a compiler or a JIT or something for Lox?

PS: the lexical analygator is the best and has shown up (with attributions of course) in several of the internal presentations at $WORK. At one point we even had fan art of him on the whiteboard, but it had to be sacrificed when we had a particularly large diagram to put on there. :|



Yes, people have definitely asked for a follow-up on compilers and/or static types. There's a little context here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40956138

I'm not sure if I'm the best person to write a compiler book, or, at least, not yet. I've written a lot of language front ends and interpreters, but I don't have much experience targeting native code. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but haven't made the time to make it happen.

Static types are also hard for the reasons the linked comment talks about.

I still think about it sometimes, but writing a book is a lot of work and I've been enjoying not writing a book for the past couple of years. :)


You could do a compromise - write a book on crafting interpreters that use Truffle to be partially evaluated into compilers.


[flagged]


It's my favorite illustration in the book too. :)


on bro




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