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Thorsten Ball
Personal blog · interpreterbook.com · on HN as misternuggetprogramming
Thorsten Ball writes Writing An Interpreter In Go, a personal blog at interpreterbook.com about programming. Since 2016, 71 different Hacker News readers have linked it 80 times, most often “Writing An Interpreter In Go (2016)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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80mentions?
71HN people?
2016–2026first – last linked?
This book takes you from 0 lines of code to a fully working interpreter for the Monkey programming language. Step by step. All code shown and included. Fully unit tested.
Most-linked posts?
- Writing An Interpreter In Go (2016)53 people · 60 mentions · first linked 2016-11-23
- Writing an Interpreter in Go (2016)18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2016-12-02
What Hacker News says?
These are great suggestions! A few years ago I worked through building a spreadsheet in JavaScript. It was a great introduction to interpreters. I read through Writing an Interpreter in Go by Thorsten Ball [1]. Constraining the interpreter to execute formulas in cells was a straight-forward way to approach building one from scratch. Writing a Pratt parser as part of this forced me to understand how it works. Figurin…
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on “Challenging projects every programmer should try”Submitted Writing An Interpreter In Go (2016) as a story · 305 points
HN discussionhttps://interpreterbook.com/ https://compilerbook.com/ I <3 these books. They're very well written, and I recommend them every time this question comes up. I also have https://github.com/cweagans/awesome-diy-software , which is similar to the project-based-learning link that you posted.
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on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThorsten Ball's Writing An Interpreter In Go. A fantastically written technical book that walks through writing an interpreter for a simple programming language. It's test driven and a great introduction to the core concepts. Also a good book to get hands on with idiomatic Go code. https://interpreterbook.com/ Thorsten does a great job talking about the concepts in the book in this Go Time podcast: https://changelog…
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on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go (2016) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI've been making my way through "Writing an Intepreter in Go" and "Writing a compiler in Go" https://interpreterbook.com/ The Go stuff is really just a means to an end, the real value comes from the practical learnings of how to build a functioning interpreter and compiler (and virtual machine!) for a programming language the author made up called Monkey. It's not a book full of theory but it lays some nice foundati…
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on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI haven't bought or started this yet, but this book on interpreters is on my todo list: https://interpreterbook.com/
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on “Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go [Book] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://interpreterbook.com/ and the sequel https://compilerbook.com/
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on “Build Your Own Text Editor”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI read this ebook: https://interpreterbook.com/ That walks you through the process of creating a simple language. My version has since been extended a fair bit: https://github.com/skx/monkey The writing is clear, and I was familiar with the broad concepts already. (In the past I've written toy interpreters for FORTH, and similar simple languages, but usually in an adhoc fashion.)
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on “Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 3 points
HN discussion"Writing An Interpreter In Go"[1] is also pretty good. I read it after finishing crafting interpreters. [1] https://interpreterbook.com/
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on “Crafting Interpreters”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnd a follow-up book about a compiler. https://interpreterbook.com/ https://compilerbook.com/
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on “Learn more programming languages, even if you won't use them”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot my project, but Writing An Interpreter in Go is excellent: https://interpreterbook.com/
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on “Ask HN: “Write your own” or “Build your own” software projects”Submitted Writing an Interpreter in Go as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI recommend the interpreter book [ https://interpreterbook.com/ ], which isn't entirely free of charge however. On the other hand, it was enough to get me off the ground for my lexer and write a parser that wasn't entirely dumb.
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on “Ask HN: “Write your own” or “Build your own” software projects”Super basic: * https://interpreterbook.com/ * https://compilerbook.com/ Somewhat more practical: * https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ ... massive gap here ... Serious: * Engineering a Compiler (even this wastes soooo much time on parsing) * Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures * Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation I'm not exaggerating or being contrary for the sake of it when I say disregard the…
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on “C Compiler from Scratch”I'm almost done with "Writing an interpreter in Go"[0] which I highly recommend. Even though it's less theoretical than the usual books in this area I learned a ton of practical stuff and a lot of things I "knew" from more theoretical sources make now much more sense. Looking forward to work through the second book of the series [1] which is aimed at compilers. [0]: https://interpreterbook.com/ [1]: https://compiler…
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on “A crash course in compilers (2018)”There's also Thorsten Ball's Writing an Interpreter in Go[1] and Writing a Compiler in Go[2]. [1] https://interpreterbook.com/ [2] https://compilerbook.com/
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on “Crafting Interpreters: A Review”Seems to be a hot topic, a friend and colleague published this in December 2016 and I can thoroughly recommend it (Uses Go as an implementation language): - https://interpreterbook.com
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on “Show HN: Crafting Interpreters – A handbook for making programming languages”Not free but also very good is https://interpreterbook.com/
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on “Parsing Algorithms”If you're just getting comfortable with it (as I am) then something a little lighter weight than a course seems like a reasonable approach. Also, for me at least, at this point the distinction between interpreter and compiler isn't as important, and there are some very high quality interpreter resources out there. [0], [1], [2] are easy to get started with and great to work through. At the very least it seems like t…
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on “My First Fifteen Compilers”This is worth a look if you have not seen it. https://interpreterbook.com/
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on “Stanford Compilers Course”There is a similar crafting an interpreter[1] and compiler[2] pair of books for Go. I've heard good things about it, didn't work through it myself though: 1. https://interpreterbook.com 2. https://compilerbook.com
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on “Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?”For those of you that found this interesting, I also highly recommend: Writing An Interpreter in Go [1] and Crafting Interpreters [2]. [1] https://interpreterbook.com/ [2] http://craftinginterpreters.com/
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on “Bytecode compilers and interpreters”
