Monthly Meetup: Crafting an Interpreter in Rust, pt. 1

Come one, come all! For an evening of writing and enjoying Rust!

For this special meetup, we will be introducing Interpreters and writing our very own Lexical Analyzer!

For this special event and singular piece of a multi-part series, we will give a brief presentation on interpreted languages before diving into crafting our own using Rust. It really was only a matter of time before we would use our own favorite language, Rust, to make another language.

Learn how Rust can be a great choice for creating an interpreted language, taking advantage of its strict ruleset to ensure our tokenizer runs as optimally as possible, and exactly as expected. See how Rust features, such as iterators and discriminated unions, aid us not only in how we write our program, but how we design our programs around them.

It is no mystery that Rust's syntax can be difficult to comprehend. The organizers for Spokane Rust will, of course, be in attendance to help guide you through the code. Learning how to create your own interpreted language, too, can help you to gain an appreciation for Rust's own nuance, and help clarify how Rust code itself is processed!

Stay tuned, because this is just the first part!

At later meetups, we will continue working on our interpreted language. The next meetup to do with interpreted languages will take place where we left off after this one by creating a Parser for converting our Lexical Tokens into an abstract syntax tree (AST). Finally, the series will be concluded with an Evaluator, for utilizing our AST and managing our interpreted language's runtime to execute our own programs built entirely from the ground up!

This is programming from scratch (written natively in Rust)!

We hope to see you there!