kelnos/rlox

An in-progress rust implementation of an interpreter for the lox language (see http://www.craftinginterpreters.com)

rlox

rlox is a rust implementation of an interpreter for the Lox language used in the Crafting Interpreters book. I decided that following along and using C (like the book does) would be too easy (heh), and I wanted to each myself rust, so... here we are.

NB: The book is an in-progress work, and the chapters that teach by writing a bytecode interpreter (rather than the tree-walk interpreter of the early chapters) haven't been written/released by the author yet. So for now I'm writing this version with a tree-walk interpreter, but will update it later when the bytecode-interpreter chapters get written (and it might be interesting to compare performance at that point).

Note that I'm in the process of learning rust, so I might be doing things in a dumb/naive way.

Usage

Building

Install rust (I'm using 1.22.0-beta.2) using rustup or your favorite other distribution. Then run:

cargo build

Running

(Note: this part doesn't work yet.)

To run the REPL, just run:

cargo run

(Note: this works, but I've barely implemented support for much of anything so far.)

To run a .lox script, run:

cargo run /path/to/script.lox

Thanks

Just wanted to give a quick note of thanks to Bob Nystrom, the author of Crafting Interpreters. I always thought PL and compiler/interpreter development was a scary black art. While I do think it's still something of a black art, I'm beginning to see it's not all that scary. His book is amazingly accessible and well written. I'm looking forward to the rest of the chapters, and highly recommend reading it if you're at all interested in this topic.