This is the repo used for the in-progress book "Crafting Interpreters". It
contains the Markdown text of the book, full implementations of both
interpreters, as well as the build system to weave the two together into the
final site.
If you find an error or have a suggestion, please do file an issue here. Thank
you!
Contributing
One of the absolute best things about writing a book online and putting it out
there before it's done is that people like you have been kind enough to give me
feedback, point out typos, and find other errors or unclear text.
If you'd like to do that, great! You can just file bugs here on the repo, or
send a pull request if you're so inclined. If you want to send a pull request,
but don't want to get the build system set up to regenerate the HTML too, don't
worry about it. I'll do that when I pull it in.
Ports and implementations
Another way to get involved is by sharing your own implementation of Lox. Ports
to other languages are particularly useful since not every reader likes Java and
C. Feel free to add your Lox port or implementation to the wiki:
Building Stuff
I am a terribly forgetful, error-prone mammal, so I automated as much as I
could.
Prerequisites
I develop on an OS X machine, but any POSIX system should work too. With a
little extra effort, you should be able to get this working on Windows as well,
though I can't help you out much.
Most of the work is orchestrated by make. The build scripts, test runner, and
other utilities are all written in Python 3. The makefile assumes python3 is
on your PATH, but it only uses that to set up a Python venv environement which
it then uses for everything else:
$ make setup
This creates the Python environment at util/env and installs the required
packages into it. All other Python scripts in the repo invoke Python from this
environment.
You also need Sass installed and on your PATH. Follow the instructions there
to install it for your OS.
In order to compile the two interpreters, you need some C compiler on your path
as well as javac.
Building
Once you've got that setup, try:
$ make
If everything is working, that will generate the site for the book as well as
compiling the two interpreters clox and jlox. You can run either interpreter
right from the root of the repo:
$ ./clox
$ ./jlox
Hacking on the book
The Markdown and snippets of source code are woven together into the final
HTML using a hand-written little static site generator, util/build.py. It's
a fairly simple static site generator. The generated HTML is committed in
the repo under site/. It is built from a combination of Markdown for prose,
which lives in book/, and snippets of code that are weaved in from the Java
and C implementations in java/ and c/. (All of those funny looking comments
in the source code are how it knows which snippet goes where.)
The script that does all the magic is util/build.py. You can run that
directly, or run:
$ make book
That generates the entire site in one batch. If you are incrementally working
on it, you'll want to run the development server:
$ make serve
This runs a little HTTP server on localhost rooted at the site/ directory.
Any time you request a page, it regenerates any files whose sources have been
changed, including Markdown files, interpreter source files, templates, and
assets. Just let that keep running, edit files locally, and refresh your
browser to see the changes.
Building the interpreters
You can build each interpreter like so:
$ make clox
$ make jlox
This builds the final version of each interpreter as it appears at the end of
its part in the book.
You can also see what the interpreters look like at the end of each chapter.
(I use this to make sure they are working even in the middle of the book.) This
is driven by a script, util/split_chapters.py that uses the same comment
markers for the code snippets to determine which chunks of code are present in
each chapter. It takes only the snippets that have been seen by the end of each
chapter and produces a new copy of the source in gen/, one directory for
each chapter's code. (These are also an easier way to view the source code
since they have all of the distracting marker comments stripped out.)
Then, each of those can be built separately. Run:
$ make c_chapters
And in the build/ directory, you'll get an executable for each chapter, like
chap14_chunks, etc. Likewise:
$ make java_chapters
This compiles the Java code to classfiles in build/gen/ in a subdirectory for
each chapter.
Repository Layout
asset/– Sass files and jinja2 templates used to generate the site.book/- Markdown files for the text of each chapter.build/- Intermediate files and other build output (except for the site)
itself go here. Not committed to Git.c/– Source code of clox, the interpreter written in C. Also contains an
XCode project, if that's your thing.gen/– Java source files generated by GenerateAst.java go here. Not
committed.java/– Source code of jlox, the interpreter written in Java.note/– Various research, notes, TODOs, and other miscellanea.note/answers– Sample answers for the challenges. No cheating!site/– The final generated site. The contents of this directory directly
mirror craftinginterpreters.com. Most content here is generated by build.py,
but fonts, images, and JS only live here. Everything is committed, even the
generated content.test/– Test cases for the Lox implementations.util/– Tools and build scripts. The test runner and build system that
generate the site from the Markdown and source files live here.