Compilers

I have been working with Claude Code for maybe a year, in various ways. Often, I would use it to understand compiler error messages, since I’ve been teaching myself Rust for that time and more, and as you might know, the Rust borrow checker can give one fits. I would also purposefully limit my use of Claude when programming Rust because I want to learn Rust, and you learn by doing; reading code doesn’t have the same impact. In some cases I worked on projects where I would write the backend (whether Java or Rust) and have Claude build me the frontend, since I am barely literate with frontend stuff and whatever literacy I did have with JavaScript, Typescript, React, Angular or whatever I have been quickly dumping from core memory. ...

Written with AI This post — and all the code behind it — was built with Claude Code. Read Part 0 for the full story of how this AI-assisted project came together. If you have ever been curious about how programming languages actually work — how text you type into an editor ends up running as a program — this series is for you. We are going to build a complete compiler for a language called Lox, from scratch, in Rust. By the end you will have seen every layer of a real language implementation: the tokenizer, the parser, a tree-walk interpreter, a bytecode virtual machine, and an LLVM-powered native code compiler. ...