Why Compiler is a very breathtaking project for devs and single dev
I just got into the parser stage 2 days ago and the design was flowing like a breeze. Since my compiler is focused as a system programming compiler for my custom language, I was at the type checking (local type checking) phase.
This is where I created a util.hpp file in which I wrote a namespace containing polymorphic code as it is a global type system my compiler will use to verify type at compile time.
My compiler makes sure it does everything at compile time as it really benefits — creating a custom language means you're definitely tired of the scope of the current language compiler, so that's why we're here!
Type System
The compiler tries to be ambitious like Zig and more than it, as it supports variable width types from 1 to 65535 for both unsigned and signed. I won't lie, I learned the formula for signed and unsigned, but like I said, the compiler scope got in my way: how do I store 2^65535 - 1 for unsigned value range? As we famous graphics devs and codecs know, u8 is from 0 to 255. Wait, it's unrelated.
My Ambitions
I'm a rising video codec engineer but no traditional DCT, motion vector in my vision. I did try to invent a proprietary upscaler called GVEST (Geometry Vector Expansion Spatial Transform). It's better than bilinear by a few tens of dB in edge construction without blurring, and same dB on a noisy image. If you want to see the images, I will try to upload the graph and simulation results which AI did run Python code to generate, in another Non-Compiler Series of ours. So to cut the story short, I knew entropy coding and video codecs need not just runtime precision but memory precision. And don't get me wrong — Gemini AI helped me fix the formula, as fitting the above range results from the above formula is not my path and I didn't see it coming, and I don't want another hour of burnout. I want to add theoretical bit-size memory allocation to the value of that variable bits to memory, meaning if a u8 (which is 1 byte) and the value was 5 which doesn't take the whole 8 bits or byte, why waste memory? But it's non-trivial as unpacking them will be a big fight, but I'm still going that route.
What's still breathtaking
Won't lie — I'm very ambitious. I've got so much type system, DSA to optimize at compile time. I asked AI why no language optimizes tree-based DSA as I knew little about them. All my life from JS to C++ wasn't more than structs and arrays (with vector in C++'s case). I did learn DSA in my days as a JS dev, but C++ is different in everything: containers abstraction, STL, iterators, the .data() + index, end or the .begin(), .end() — it's everywhere in C++, and beginners and experienced devs definitely still go to the docs once in a while. And honestly, the docs aren't great too.
I went through serious burnout today as I want my language, even if C++-like, to have ownership and lifetime and memory validation, if you've seen my ambition above. It will also be friendly and clear with error messages, and I'm already proud of my lexer stage error messages on my string and char warnings and recovery on unterminated literals. It's really a breathtaking journey.
Closing it all up
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I'm happy building the project as I'm not looking at where I am but where it's going to be. I'm breaking the LLVM oath solo, and you can too. If you follow up, everything counts for me.