clox

Implementation of Bob Nystrom's Lox language in C following his book Crafting Interpreters.

Lox is a simple dynamically-typed language similar in syntax to Python. It supports imperitive style structures like if, while and for statements as well as functions. It also has basic OOP capabilities such as classes and inheritence.

clox is a simple bytecode compiler and VM unified into a single simple interpreter architecture meaning your Lox scripts are compiled to bytecode and executed on the fly.

This interpreter was used as a learning tool and is not recommended for professional use.

Building

If you wish to build clox yourself you will need CMake (>=v3.21) and any relatively recent C compiler. This project has a relatively simple CMake config utilising CMake presets to control flags and build options.

cmake -S . -B build --preset=<platform>
cmake --build build
./build/clox

Available platforms:

• linux
• linux-dev
• macos
• macos-dev
• win64
• win64-dev
• sanitize : Turns on santizers on Linux platforms
• linux-dev-strict : Additional checks made on linux using clang-tidy and cpp-check

Note: There are addition targets that can be built using the -t flag during the build step called spell-check, spell-fix, format-check and format-fix. These require clang-format and codespell to work correctly.

Changes

This project is almost entirely par-for-par with Bob Nystrom's version from his book. It differs in setup with this project using a somewhat proper CMake config. I also do not like the usage of global variables in Nystrom's version and thus mine weaves the global variables throughout the compiler and VM as needed.

I also made jlox based on the first part of Nystrom's book.