This is the first post in a three part series. Check out part 2 and part 3 when you are ready.

It is a beautiful day outside, so let’s make a compiler. You don’t need any knowledge of how compilers work to follow along. We are going to use Python to implement our own programming language, Teeny Tiny, that will compile to C code. It will take about 500 lines of code and provide the initial infrastructure needed to customize and extend the compiler into your own billion dollar production-ready compiler.

This tutorial is a series of posts that go step by step in building a working compiler. All of the source code can be found in the GitHub repo. If you follow along with all the posts, I guesstimate that it will take you only a few hours.

The Teeny Tiny language we are going to implement is a dialect of BASIC. The syntax is clean and simple. If you prefer a C-like syntax then it will be trivial to modify the compiler at the end.