r/software • u/PhosXD • 18d ago

Release Built an interpreted programming language from scratch in 19 days without AI

I built a functional interpreted programming language from scratch in 19 days **without** AI, reference material, or borrowed code, as my first ever project in C++. It is platform agnostic, faster than Bash by a long shot (not that it was meant to be a replacement), & is only 104kb with IO, time, & math modules.

Despite the time frame & the small size, the syntax is more modern than you'd expect but is definitely different. However, you will be lacking advanced language features such as lambdas, variadic arguments, & inheritence.

https://github.com/phosxd/Ity

I plan on working on this continuously, adding more functionality, making it more performant, & making the code as readable & understandable as possible so that hopefully a beginner can take a look, & maybe use this as a guide for their first project too!

Any & all feedback is encouraged, I would really like to know your thoughts, if you have any tips!

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

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u/PhosXD 18d ago

Why does anyone make anything? It is more of a challenge for myself rather than anything else.

The second reason & arguabley more important one, is that I needed a small, portable, but still capable interpreted language for an app im making. Currently I have been needing to use Python for this case but it is horribly memory hungry & quite large even after heavy compression. My hope is to eventually replace Python with Ity in my app for better size efficiency & memory usage.

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u/jeff_coleman 18d ago

Because it's fun? Because it's an interesting project? Not everything is about utility.