Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 6

September 14, 2024 in Programming, Roc

In earlier articles, I introduced this “WAT to Wasm compiler in Roc” project, wrote some Roc code to load an input file, and implemented a tokenizer for a “hello world” of Wat to Wasm compilation. It was… more work than I expected. Four blog posts more work, to be precise! I have no idea where it’s going to end.

But I do know what’s next! Parsing.

Reminder: You are reading content that took a great deal of effort to craft, compose, and debug. If you appreciate this work, consider supporting me on Patreon or GitHub.

Continue reading

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 5

September 6, 2024 in Programming, Roc

In earlier articles, I introduced this compiler project, wrote some Roc code to load an input file, and started implementing a tokenizer with error handling.

I think I need to admit that I have absolutely no clue how to estimate how long a blog article is going to be. I thought “build a compiler” would be one article. And then I thought “build a tokenizer” would be one article. sigh

I swear we’ll be done with tokenizing at the end of this post. But first we’ll take a detour to have a look at Roc’s very elegant built-in testing syntax.

Reminder: You are reading content that took a great deal of effort to craft, compose, and debug. If you appreciate this work, consider supporting me on Patreon or GitHub.

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 4

August 29, 2024 in Programming, Roc

In earlier articles, I introduced the project, wrote some Roc code to load an input file, and started implementing a Tokenizer.

This part takes a bit of a detour with a refactor to support rudimentary error reporting.

Reminder: You are reading content that took a great deal of effort to craft, compose, and debug. If you appreciate this work, consider supporting me on Patreon or GitHub.

Handling Errors during Tokenizing

Before we start adding more tokens to tokenize the Hello World module, I want to beef up our error handling a bit. There are a few reasons I don’t like the basic dbg nextByte we are currently using the wildcard arm:

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 3

August 22, 2024 in Programming, Roc

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, I introduced the project and we wrote some Roc code to load an input file and save the compiled result to a different file.

Note: Other articles in this series are collected here.

However, we are a long ways from actually having that compiled result available! This article introduces the phases involved in writing a compiler and focus on implementing the first phase, known as lexical analysis or tokenizing.

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 2

August 15, 2024 in Programming, Roc

My latest hair-brained project is a WAT-to-Wasm compiler written in the Roc programming language. I explained my (ir)rationale for the project in Part 1 of this series, which also included an introduction to the technologies we’ll be using.

Note: Other articles in this series are collected here.

In this article, we’ll get started writing some Roc code. We won’t get to the point where we are doing anything with WAT or Wasm, yet, but we will be able to load an input file and parse some command line arguments.

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 1: Introduction

August 11, 2024 in Programming, Roc

I’ve been curious about the Roc programming language for a while now, but I haven’t had/taken the time to really dig into it. I’ve read through the tutorial several times, but only yesterday did I actually sit down and install Roc and implement the tutorial. Today, I woke up with the ridiculous idea to build a compiler in the language.

A simple compiler, to be clear.

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 6

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 5

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 4

Handling Errors during Tokenizing

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 3

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 2

Build a Wasm Compiler in Roc - Part 1: Introduction

Dusty Phillips