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> Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month. It all depends on the language. Tiny domain specif
by DougMerritt 13y ago
> Also it won't take "years" to get a working prototype. You can get something working in less than a month.
It all depends on the language. Tiny domain specific languages might only take hours, under the right circumstances (for an experienced language implementer).
When someone says "years", I assume they mean an industrial strength general purpose language.
- cpncrunch 13y agoYes, perhaps a month was optimistic. Looking back through my emails, I see it took me 5 months (in my spare time) to design my language and instruction set and develop the compiler and VM. After that I wrote the function libraries. This was the first (and only) compiler I've written, and I just bought a book on compiler construction to figure out how to do it. This was an object-oriented C-like language, which was general purpose. It took a few years of actually using the language to make it "instustrial strength". Writing a compiler is a lot simpler than people might think. I used "Practice and Principles of Compiler Building With C", which explains things very well. It seems to be out of print now.