I'm writing a book again!
It's called Writing A Compiler In Go and is the sequel to Writing An Interpreter In Go.
It's a sequel in code and in prose. We're picking up right where we left off and write a compiler and a virtual machine for Monkey. Just like before, the focus is runnabled and tested code, built from the ground up, step by step. Only this time, we're compiling and executing bytecode. It's the next step in Monkey's evolution.
Find out more at compilerbook.com
Hi there! My name is Thorsten Ball. I'm a software developer living in Aschaffenburg, Germany, a small city near Frankfurt am Main.
I like to develop, optimize and take care of sophisticated systems. Or put another way: I like to program where the rubber hits the road -- wherever that may be.
At daytime, as a software developer at ioki, I work with a web stack: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML and also CSS (please don't ask me about floats). I also use Go and even shipped performance-increasing C code to production. If you ask me how much I like PostgreSQL and SQL, I'll talk your ears off.
But before I leave for work, in the early morning hours, I love to deep dive into other programming topics that interest me: programming languages, interpreters, compilers, web servers, systems programming, Unix, databases. I'm a big fan of digging deep and peeling away at abstraction layers to get a better sense of what I'm working with and more leverage higher up. In short: I love learning new things.
Books
Writing An Interpreter In Go
Self-published in November 2016
In the book we build a programming language from scratch. We start with 0 lines of code and end up with a fully working interpreter for the Monkey programming language. We build the lexer, the parser, the AST, the object system, and the evaluator — written with tests first and without 3rd-party libraries. This book is not about theory, its focus is runnable, working code.
Find out more and buy it at interpreterbook.com
Writing A Compiler In Go — Coming soon!
About to be released in July 2018
This is the sequel to Writing An Interpreter In Go and contains the next step in the evolution of the Monkey programming language: we're switching out the tree-walking evaluator for a bytecode compiler and virtual machine. It starts where the first book ends, uses the same codebase and follows the same approach: working code front and center, written from the ground up, tested and runnable.
Find out more about it at compilerbook.com
Posts
You can subscribe to post updates via the Atom feed.
- 28 Jun 2017 The Lost Chapter: A Macro System For Monkey
- 22 Feb 2017 Writing An Interpreter In Go: The Paperback Edition
- 08 Feb 2017 Higher Value Tools
- 16 Jan 2017 What I didn't do to write a book
- 04 Jan 2017 A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go
- 30 Nov 2016 Why I Wrote a Book About Interpreters
- 16 Nov 2016 Putting Eval In Go
- 22 Oct 2015 Write Stupid Code
- 20 Nov 2014 Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks
- 13 Oct 2014 Why threads can't fork
- 13 Jun 2014 Where did fork go?
- 12 Mar 2014 Watching and Understanding the Ruby 2.1 Garbage Collector at Work
- 11 Aug 2013 Named Pipes
- 07 Apr 2013 Watchgopher
- 15 Jan 2013 Discipline
- 24 Oct 2012 Command Line Ride
- 02 Sep 2012 Software Cover Versions And Programming Licks
- 09 Jul 2012 Vim Learning Resources
- 20 Jun 2012 How I used 98840 commands less and saved 4 seconds
- 08 Jun 2012 Ordered Search Autocompletion With Redis
Talks
- 14 Sep 2017 Elixir |> RheinMain Elixir - Macros On Erlang (Slides)
- 06 Apr 2017 Frankfurt Gophers Meetup A Virtual Brainfuck Machine In Go (Slides)
- 04 Nov 2015 Hochschule Trier Software Engineering at Flinc
- 13 Mar 2015 wroc_love.rb in Wroclaw, Poland Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)
- 11 Feb 2015 flinc Lunch-Talk in Darmstadt, Germany Introduction to Go (Slides)
- 02 Oct 2014 ArrrrCamp in Ghent, Belgium Unicorn Unix Magic Tricks (Slides)
Podcasts
- 30 Jun 2017The Hanselminutes Podcast - YOU should write an interpreter with Thorsten Ball
- 23 Dec 2016Go Time #28 - Creating a Programming Language with Thorsten Ball
Projects
Applikatoni - A deployment server for small teams with multiple applications, written in Go, developed at flinc.
Fzz - Small command line tool that makes your command line interactive. Also see vim-fzz.
Watchgopher - A lightweight, scriptable and UNIX-y filewatcher.
dotfiles - My dotfiles. git, zsh, tmux, etc.
vimconfig - Everything that goes on in my ~/.vim folder.
Recreational Programming
Not finished, not stable, not ready for production, but fun!
Helles - A multi-process webserver written entirely in C.
Sceem - A small Lisp/Scheme interpreter written in Ruby.
Contact
Never hesitate to send me an email at me@thorstenball.com. I love getting email from you.
You can also find me on Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, XING and Facebook.
I also maintain a mailing list, on which I sent out occasional updates about my book or this blog. I won't spam you and you can unsubscribe at any time.