Language Implementation Patterns

Dissecting a Few Applications

Language applications are a bit like fractals. As you zoom in on their architecture diagrams, you see that their pipeline stages are themselves multistage pipelines. For example, though we see compilers as black boxes, they are actually deeply nested pipelines. They are so complicated that we have to break them down into lots of simpler components. Even the individual top-level components are pipelines. Digging deeper, the same data structures and algorithms pop up across applications and stages.

This section dissects a few language applications to expose their architectures. We’ll look at a bytecode interpreter, a bug finder (source code analyzer), and a C/C++ compiler. The goal is to emphasize the architectural ...