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Repository for the book "Crafting Interpreters"
http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/
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Suggestion for Section 30.4: Where to Next #880

Closed ElessarDunadan closed 3 years ago

ElessarDunadan commented 3 years ago

As someone approaching writing an interpreter for the first time, though I have now worked through the entire "book", it's still unclear how to free the code from the stack: My code->Lox interpreter->C->Machine code

I would love to see in section 30.4 some recommended resources and/or advice to move towards: My code->Lox interpreter->Machine code

This book does a good job of explaining how to write a VM, but has left me without understanding how to skip a VM entirely. Perhaps I missed something, but that's been my experience.

I realize that there are many in the community could explain this to me. However, since this book is targeted towards those who want to learn these things, I believe that it would be a great asset to those who, like me, would like a small push further in the direction of the above concepts.

ChayimFriedman2 commented 3 years ago

Machine code is not really different from a register based VM, it's just somewhat harder to encode (esp. for x86) and lower-level (depends on the VM we're comparing to).

munificent commented 3 years ago

The last chapter does suggest:

I like Cooper and Torczon’s “Engineering a Compiler” for this. Appel’s “Modern Compiler Implementation” is also well regarded.

That's probably about all I can do to get people moving in the right direction. I think me actually explaining how to compile all the way to machine code would a whole other book. :)