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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

I briefly described Inko’s unique memory management model in my previous article. In this one, I want to go into a little more detail on single ownership and move semantics by implementing a few linked lists, and a couple graphs. This is a tutorial about Inko and not about data structures, so I am assuming that you have a passing knowledge of the data structures in question (or know how to use a search engine to get that passing knowledge).

Continue reading

Introduction This is the sixth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. In this one, I’m setting aside my little password cracking project to look at gleam for frontend development. I love Rescript for frontend development, it’s a very practical functional programming language, and I’ve written a lot on the topic. So this article will also be a bit of a comparison of Gleam and Rescript. This isn’t really a fair comparison as Rescript is a mature language, and Gleam’s Javascript support is super brand new.

Continue reading

Introduction This is the fifth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. In the most recent article, we started exploring how Gleam interfaces with ERLang’s powerful OTP concurrency framework to brute force some passwords. However, it was suboptimal, partially because I didn’t know what I was doing, and partially because I didn’t have time to go into some of the deeper details. I also had a super valuable tip from the Gleam discussion group that I wanted to go into.

Continue reading

Introduction This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring the Gleam programming language. The first article explored some of the most basic features of Gleam; just enough to say hello. The second discussed looping constructs, namely that gleam doesn’t have them. The third was supposed to be about parallel programming and OTP, but it ended up being more about looping and recursion. So this one is about parallel programming and OTP.

Continue reading

Author's picture

Dusty Phillips

Canadian author and software developer.

Author and software developer

New Brunswick, Canada