It was directly due to the words of a couple of well respected bloggers that I started this one. There are multiple reasons. By writing, you exercise the communication part of the brain, which is always good. By putting up a public blog, it becomes easier to control your own Internet presence. As long as your writing is even passable, it is good marketing for yourself. These were just a few of the points that were made. I bought into it and am now going on a couple of months of roughly weekly posts. I believe I can keep this up rather easily.

So, one mission accomplished.

On more than one occasion, one of these people who are well respected in the software development field will mention something about a compiler. Specifically, that every serious programmer should write one at some point in time. This makes sense as a compiler tends to be one of those bits of software that does a good job of covering pretty much everything that a programmer needs to do somewhat regularly. Lots of string manipulation, lots of recursion, lots of knowledge about how a computer actually works, memory management, the list goes on.

I have not yet written a compiler. It is something that I have wanted to do more than once, but never actually sat down and started working on it. I’ve seen enough mentions in passing recently that I feel it is time for me to complete this particular rite of passage and actually write a compiler. I am capable of it, but I needed the push down the right path to do it.

So it is not going to be a huge project and I’m not going to sink huge amounts of time into it, but I do have goals for it that should be completed by the end of 2009. I need to define my own language, it should have ifs and whiles, it should evaluate mathmatical expressions correctly. I think I will compile to JVM compatible byte code, though I have not decided on that yet either. That would theoretically allow me to use Java libraries as well, which is appealing. It’s not going to be object oriented, mainly as this is a learning experience and I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew so to speak.

I’m leaning towards Ruby for the project, but am stronger with Java which will make some things significantly easier. I will likely make the final decision once I’ve read some of the Dragon book and know more about what I am getting into. My intention is to write it all at this point. I don’t think I will use a parser generator or anything like that, simply as the point of this is to learn how to write a parser/lexer/etc.

So that’s the plan for 2009, dedicate a couple of hours a week to this project and hopefully be able to run some of my own code in my own language by the end of the year. Who knows if that’s reasonable, but it should be… illuminating.