reflow

reflow is a custom programming languages that includes a custom built interpreter (and future compiler). This language was designed to learn more about what programming languages are and what interpreters and compilers are.

Compiler vs. Interpreter Benchmark

This table includes some programming problems and their benchmark tests using the Interpreter and Compiler. All the benchmark tests were executed on a 2020 Intel MacBook (32GB RAM, 2.3 GHz Quad-Code Intel Core i7).

Programming Problem	Interpreter (in seconds)	Compiler (in seconds)
Calculate Fibonacci Sequence	18.7	4.5

Compiler Packages

Interpreter Packages

lexer: takes source code as input and outputs tokens that represent the source code,
lexer/token: defines the tokens and useful functions to look up tokens,
parser: takes source code (in tokens) as input and produces a data structure which represents the source code,
evaluator: takes the AST and interpret it on the fly via a tree-walking interpreter without preprocessing or extra compilation,
object: value system or object representation and it represents the values it generates when evaluating the AST,
repl: read eval print loop

How to use

To get started, clone the repository by following this command:

$ git clone git@github.com:FlorianWoelki/reflow.git

After that, you can feel free to directly run the shell in cmd/shell.go via:

go run cmd/shell.go

This will open up the reflow shell. From there, you can experiment with the programming language itself.