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Overview of Compilers and Interpreters |
Begin by reading the following sections of Crafting Interpreters:
Next, complete the implementation challenges in the included exercise files:
Part 1: Evaluating Expressions
The first part is to write a function that evaluates an arbitrary expression (such as 1 + 2 - 3 * 4), where the expression is given in the form of an "abstract syntax tree" (AST) generated by the parser package. The actual AST types, together with some useful helper functions, are defined in the ast package.
You can assume that the expression (before parsing) only contained integer literals, basic arithmetic operations, and parentheses.
Part 2: Refactoring
The second part is to write a function that refactors Go files by sorting all function definitions in alphabetical order. Although reordering functions is a relatively simple operation in the grand scheme of things, the goal of this part is to demonstrate the benefit of working with code in a structured format (rather than raw text).
Note that Go's built-in ast library wasn't designed with code generation in mind. For example, see #20744. Instead, we recommend the third-party dst library.
After finishing this part, you may want to consider:
- Are there other useful refactoring operations you might be interested in implementing (e.g. renaming variables in a scope-aware way, adding or reordering method parameters)?
- Do you have any ideas how you might implement a tool such as gofmt?
Part 3: Bytecode Compilation
Given a simple Go function func f(x, y byte) byte as input, can you compile it into bytecode that runs on a virtual machine (similar to the one you implemented in Introduction to Computer Systems)?
You can find more details about this part in the README included with the exercise files.