Daniel's Blog

Tagged "C and C++"

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 13 - Cleanup

  8232 words, about 39 minutes to read.

  In part 12, we added let/in and lambda expressions to our compiler. At the end of that post, I mentioned that before we move on to bigger and better things, I wanted to take a step back and clean up the compiler. . . .

• How Many Values Does a Boolean Have?

  2079 words, about 10 minutes to read.

  A friend of mine recently had an interview for a software engineering position. They later recounted to me the content of the technical questions that they had been asked. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 12 - Let/In and Lambdas

  10266 words, about 49 minutes to read.

  Now that our language’s type system is more fleshed out and pleasant to use, it’s time to shift our focus to the ergonomics of the language itself. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 11 - Polymorphic Data Types

  4366 words, about 21 minutes to read.

  In part 10, we managed to get our compiler to accept functions that were polymorphically typed. However, a piece of the puzzle is still missing: while our functions can handle values of different types, the same cannot be said for our data types. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 10 - Polymorphism

  8082 words, about 38 minutes to read.

  In part 8, we wrote some pretty interesting programs in our little language. We successfully expressed arithmetic and recursion. But there’s one thing that we cannot express in our language without further changes: an if statement. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 9 - Garbage Collection

  4807 words, about 23 minutes to read.

  “When will you learn? When will you learn that your actions have consequences?” So far, we’ve entirely ignored the problem of memory management. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 8 - LLVM

  4847 words, about 23 minutes to read.

  We don’t want a compiler that can only generate code for a single platform. Our language should work on macOS, Windows, and Linux, on x86_64, ARM, and maybe some other architectures. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 7 - Runtime

  2160 words, about 11 minutes to read.

  Wikipedia has the following definition for a runtime: A [runtime] primarily implements portions of an execution model. We know what our execution model is! . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 6 - Compilation

  4949 words, about 24 minutes to read.

  In the previous post, we defined a machine for graph reduction, called a G-machine. However, this machine is still not particularly connected to our language. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 5 - Execution

  4438 words, about 21 minutes to read.

  We now have trees representing valid programs in our language, and it’s time to think about how to compile them into machine code, to be executed on hardware. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 4 - Small Improvements

  2117 words, about 10 minutes to read.

  We’ve done quite a big push in the previous post. We defined type rules for our language, implemented unification, and then implemented unification to enforce these rules for our program. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 3 - Type Checking

  5793 words, about 28 minutes to read.

  I think tokenizing and parsing are boring. The thing is, looking at syntax is a pretty shallow measure of how interesting a language is. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 2 - Parsing

  3673 words, about 18 minutes to read.

  In the previous post, we covered tokenizing. We learned how to convert an input string into logical segments, and even wrote up a tokenizer to do it according to the rules of our language. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 1 - Tokenizing

  1954 words, about 10 minutes to read.

  It makes sense to build a compiler bit by bit, following the stages we outlined in the first post of the series. . . .

• Compiling a Functional Language Using C++, Part 0 - Intro

  971 words, about 5 minutes to read.

  During my last academic term, I was enrolled in a compilers course. We had a final project - develop a compiler for a basic Python subset, using LLVM. . . .

• Local Development Environment for JOS and CS 444

  733 words, about 4 minutes to read.

  Working with the instructor’s dotfiles on the server is great and all, but there’s a few things you can do loccally that you can’t do on the school server: . . .

• Learning Emulation, Part 2.5 - Implementation

  851 words, about 4 minutes to read.

  This is the third post in a series I’m writing about Chip-8 emulation. If you want to see the first one, head here. . . .

• Learning Emulation, Part 2

  649 words, about 4 minutes to read.

  This is the second post in a series I’m writing about Chip-8 emulation. If you want to see the first one, head here. . . .

• Learning Emulation, Part 1

  570 words, about 3 minutes to read.

  I’ve decided that the purpose of a blog is to actually use it every once in a while. So, to fill up this blank space, I’ll be documenting my own experience of starting to learn how emulation works. . . .