Copper Interpreter Published!

Finally the code-base for the first Copper language interpreter has been published on Github!

The Birth of Copper

I do love languages, and (as I wrote in my very first post on this blog) Copper has its origins in Goldfish, a language initially intended for AI. In a way, making a language was still on the bucket list, so the things I said in that post are not lie, but there is more to the story.

return(benchmark)

Finally, enough of the engine has been reimplemented such that I was able to perform benchmarking again. The results don’t look good.

Progress Report #5

State Restored!

That about describes everything about Copper right now, for the most part. The Copper interpreter was originally a state machine and the new version isn’t any different in that regard. But the “state restored” in this case primarily refers to the fact that everything I had in the original version of the interpreter has been restored in the new version including all the built-in functions. That means I’m back to where I was about 5 weeks ago, but this time, I have what I believe to be a MUCH faster interpreter, though I have yet to benchmark it. (Ok, so the ability to run Copper functions outside of Copper has not been finished and I’ll talk about that.)

Progress Report #4

Transition complete. There are now 3 branches: fn, Bobcat, and master (also known as “Cheetah”). I’m hoping that the new code-base in Cheetah will prove to be much faster than the original design. All things considered, I knew I had designed a slow system. It was effective and relatively easy to maintain, and the new system is likely to be slightly more challenging. However, I maxed out what I was going to get out of the old design. The processing code was very bulky with tons of methods dedicated to it. I spoke about its task system in a previous post, which should have been published a long time ago, but now is as good a time as ever to compare it with the new system. The new system (the new engine, that is) has a separate parsing and execution system, reducing the primary execution sector (the methods doing the repetitive operations) to only a handful of methods.

The Task Processing Model – Branch Bobcat

ATTENTION: This applies to the first two branches of Copper, known as “fn” (original, using “fn” for function start syntax) and “Bobcat” (the version to begin using the square bracket syntax). The task-processing system has been replaced in the new master branch known as “Cheetah”.

Copper is a very simple language. Unsurprisingly, the language requires a number of little quirks on the backside that make the model I’ve chosen for processing tokens to look like gold in hindsight. … Maybe I’ve just done this before and learned from experience. 😉

Good names are golden

Names are an important part of programming. They should be relatively easy to create. Up until this development point, I wasn’t making that the case, and because of that, things were looking alot more difficult.