Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by myco_logic 701 days ago
Personal choice, is what I'd say. You can get a lot of mileage out of implementing a dynamic language with NaN boxing[1].

It really depends on the kind of language you're trying to build an interpreter for, and what purpose it could serve. For dynamic languages, I'd say looking at the core types of Erlang is a great place to start (Integers, Symbols, Functions, etc.). For a statically typed language things get more complex, but even with just numeric types, characters, and some kind of aggregating type like a Struct you can build up more complex data structures in your language itself.

[1]: https://leonardschuetz.ch/blog/nan-boxing/

1 comments

Really neat article, this is my first encounter with the concept of NaN Boxing. Thanks for sharing!