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I'm surprised that we don't see more compilers and interpreters written in Lisp, since people seem to believe that writing compilers in Lisp is easier than othe
by coliveira 6y ago
I'm surprised that we don't see more compilers and interpreters written in Lisp, since people seem to believe that writing compilers in Lisp is easier than other languages. In fact most compilers and interpreters are written in C.
- Athas 6y agoI don't think this is true anymore. From the TIOBE top 10 (that hallowed source of truth), I count only three languages whose main implementation is written in C (Python, PHP, R). Extending to top 20 only adds two more (Perl and Ruby). All of those are interpreters. Most compilers seem to be implemented in the language they are compiling. It appears that C++ is the most popular implementation language, although C is number two - but neither constitute a majority.
- coliveira 6y agoHowever my note is about Lisp in particular. Apart from a few cases, Lisp is little used to implement compilers for other languages.