Vibe Coding a Lox Compiler, Part 4: The Tree-Walk Interpreter
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. Previously in this series we built the tokenizer (Part 2) and the recursive descent parser (Part 3), turning raw source text into a typed AST. Part 1 gave the bird’s-eye view of the whole pipeline. At this point, vibe-lox can take a .lox file, scan it into tokens, and parse those tokens into a tree of strongly-typed Rust structs — every node stamped with a unique ExprId for later use. Now we need to actually run the thing. This post covers the first execution backend: the tree-walk interpreter. ...