OpenSource programming-languages in development?

Question

I'm very interested in interpreter and compiler development and because I don't want to continue building mini compilers and interpreters I thought I could help some open-source project.

• Are there currently open-source projects on compilers/interpreters in early stages seeking developers? I mean yeah.. There won't be much to do for someone like me in Python, Ruby, and so on.

Answer 1

You could try taking a look at Haxe. It's written in OCaml, so you might have some issues with starting there, but other than that -- it's small enough that even a newbie could help.

Answer 2

what you could do is try building compilers for some esoteric language, like LOLCODE, etc. in any language of your choice... which should be fun

other than the choice of language to build compiler for... required are tools to build one, could give PARROT a try

http://docs.parrot.org/parrot/latest/html/

it's a nice generic virtual machine designed for dynamic languages, should be nice

Answer 3

I'm currently working on a pure object-oriented (Smalltalk & Ruby inspired) interpreted programming language. The interpreter is written in C++ and the overall codebase is still quite small (about 8k lines of C++ and 2100 lines in the language itself including 1000 lines of automated test-code (also in the language itself)). I'm always happy about contributions and the code is pretty well documented compared to other implementations imho. Feel free to join me :)

-> http://www.fancy-lang.org

(Sorry for suggesting my own project but it meets the requirements mentioned in the question and I am seeking developers :))