nikkehtine / hydrogen

Compiler in Go following a C++ tutorial

Hydrogen compiler

Hobby programming language compiler in Go

Compiler in Go following a live coding series by @orosmatthew - Creating a Compiler (originally in C++)

Link to Matthew's original project repo

Usage

Requirements:

• Go >= 1.21
• nasm
• ld

Warning

Currently this program only works on Linux

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/nikkehtine/hydrogen.git

2. Build and run the program

   You can just use the test.sh script for now, which should build and run the program

   ./test.sh

   This script also accepts certain commands for convenience:

   • compile: just compile the program, don't run it or remove generated files
   • clean: compile and run the program, but delete generated files
   • cleanup: just delete any generated output files that exist

What works and what doesn't

• Compiling
• Parsing
• Tokenization
• Variables
• Expressions
• PEMDAS
• if statements and scopes

What I've learned and want to learn

I've learned:

• how compilers work (things such as tokenizer, lexer, outputting to assembly, linking)
• how to turn code into tokens, and then translate tokens into output
• how programs operate on low level and communicate with the operating system
• more advanced concepts about programming and the Go language, such as structs, buffers, enums, maps, unions, operations on files, accepting cli arguments, error handling

I want to:

• learn the differences in the way OSes (Windows, macOS, Linux) communicate with programs
• learn more on how certain operations and language features work on a lower level
• learn more advanced concepts about programming
• be able to brag about having written my own compiler :)

Useful resources

• Go package registry
  • os
  • fmt
  • unicode
  • bytes
• "How to do enums in Go" by Marco Franssen
• Go by Example
  • Command-line arguments
  • Reading files
• Idiomatic way in Go to represent a Tagged Union? (r/golang)
• "Sum/Union/Variant Type in Go" by haya14busa (Medium)