Notes on Crafting Interpreters
Crafting Interpreters is a book by Robert Nystrom with a self-explanatory name (interpreters here used in the computing sense meaning the software which executes source code). I thank the team at Fire Front Solutions for gifting me a copy along with a copy of the excellent Fire Weather by John Vaillant, which I have previously reviewed. My aim for August 2026 is to follow Nystrom’s lead and write two interpreters from scratch. Hopefully this process will further demistify the act of computation and allow me to better appreciate William Byrd’s lecture on “The Most Beautiful Program Ever Written”, Peter Norvig’s Lisp interpreter written in Python and of course SICP.
Notes will be separated à la the book into three parts:
A tree-walker interpreter
A bytecode virtual machine
My notes are based on code distributed by Robert Nystrom under the MIT Licence and prose distributed by Robert Nystrom under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International.
These notes do not seek in any way to be comprehensive or even necessarily understandable; they are mere remnants of the act of gaining understanding.
