J-Fall 2022: Nataliia Dziubenko – I built my own JVM language. Here’s why and how

Have you ever wondered, what your compiled code looks like? What do these bytecode instructions do? What are all these JVM languages about? I was really curious about all this myself. That’s why I ended up building my own JVM programming language. I wrote the compiler in Java, using ANTLR for building the parse tree and ASM for generating the bytecode. Building this project was a lot of fun and also a lot of learning. So in this talk I will share the journey and my learnings with you. We will talk about designing a language and building grammar with ANTLR. This knowledge can be reused to build any other DSL. Afterwards, we will dive straight into the JVM architecture and generating the bytecode using ASM framework. This will give a decent understanding of how the bytecode operations work and how the compilers work. You will see what all these JVM programming languages are doing internally. And of course, we will run some programs written in our little language to see it in action!