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I'm a computer science student. I want to create my own programming language (A basic language with few instructions).

I know how to do a syntactic analyser, I already did it in Perl. In an article, I read something about the compiler, a compiler is done in itself.

For example the C compiler is written in C. How it's possible? I can make my own language but I don't know how I could execute it? Any idea?

It's really a good question and I can write a blog the project.

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  • $\begingroup$ People have explained how to bootstrap but why do you need to? There's no reason you can't compile your language using a compiler written in C, Perl or anything else. Sure, it would be nice to have a compiler for your language written in itself but that would be a lot of work -- you'd have to write at least two compilers to get that (one in C/Perl/whatever, one in your language). $\endgroup$
    – David Richerby
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 8:34
  • $\begingroup$ Hmm.. I think I will write my first compiler in C and write a seconde in my language. It's really interesting to create a little programming language, we can learn a lot of the computer science $\endgroup$
    – BaptisteL
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 8:38

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The trick is bootstrapping. You first write a compiler for your language (or a subset thereof) in some other language. Then you write a compiler for your language (or a large subset of the one you can already handle) in your language. You use the former compiler to compile the new compiler, and then the new compiler can compile itself.

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  • $\begingroup$ So, I can create my first compiler using C and next time I will compile my compiler v2 with the v1 ? But there is a problem, how could I know the compiler doesn't have any problem ? I need to convert my source code to assembler ? Or in other thing ? $\endgroup$
    – BaptisteL
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 8:19
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    $\begingroup$ How could I know the compiler doesn't have any problem? More generally, you wrote a program; how do you know it has no bugs? You don't. You write some tests and hope for the best. Do I need to convert my source code to assembly? Definitely not. You can trust the C compiler. You are doing the same thing, but with assembly replaced with C (or any other language of your choice). $\endgroup$
    – Yuval Filmus
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 18:12
  • $\begingroup$ Okay I have to trust in my skills ^^ I wanted to ask the process do the compiler. I really don't understand what a compiler do, syntaxic and lexical analyzer okay but next ?? $\endgroup$
    – BaptisteL
    Commented Oct 20, 2013 at 21:34
  • $\begingroup$ Then you generate code. If you don't want to get into the details of generating machine code, you can always generate code in some other language, say C code, and use an external compiler to compile that into machine code. (Or you could use an interpreted language and run an interpreter.) $\endgroup$
    – Yuval Filmus
    Commented Oct 21, 2013 at 1:06
  • $\begingroup$ Hummm No I prefere do it like that : My Language in enter --> Machine Code. I don't want to convert my language in another (same for first time compile) It is possible ? $\endgroup$
    – BaptisteL
    Commented Oct 21, 2013 at 2:57
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A compiler which can compile its own sources is called a self-hosting compiler. Early compilers were written in another language. For example, the first C compiler was probably written in assembler. The whole trick in using a former lower level compiler is called bootstrapping.

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