Monkey Lang: an interpreter written by hand

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I never took the opportunity in college to take a course on compilers, so I wanted make up for it by following along with the book Writing an Interpreter in Go. It’s not a quite a compiler, but an interpreter is pretty close, right? I wanted put a spin on things, so instead of writing the project in garbage-collected Go, I wrote it in memory-unmanaged Zig!

Monkey Lang includes:

  • integers
  • booleans
  • strings
  • functions as expressions (closures)
  • if-else control flow
  • implicit and explicit returns

Here’s an example of the syntax:

let version = 1;
let name = "Monkey programming language";
let myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
let coolBooleanLiteral = true;

let awesomeValue = (10 / 2) * 5 + 30;
let arrayWithValues = [1 + 1, 2 * 2, 3];

This is my first Zig project to break the 1,000 LoC mark, so I’m sure there’s plenty of room for improvement. Let me know what constructive criticism you have!

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