The Making of a Language - a deep dive into BoxLang's implementation
Ever wondered how a programming language is made behind the scenes? Parsing, compilation, and runtime execution have a lot of moving parts. We'll take a look at how BoxLang was architected from the ground up to run CFML code and more. Things we'll cover include writing a parser with ANTLR, generating an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree), and compiling that to bytecode. Then we'll look at how the runtime casts variables and calls functions to allow a dynamic and loosely typed language to work inside of a strict and strongly-typed language. We'll cover how nesting context track variable scopes, how our module system registers BIFs (Built In Functions) and Components (what we call Tags), and how it all wires up to the different runtimes like CLI or Servlet. This will be an advanced deep dive for anyone who's wondered what's going on under the hood and wants to understand their stack better. This will also be a great intro for anyone looking to help contribute and send pulls to BoxLang!
Brad Wood
