Building Bolt: My Journey to a Production-Ready Compiler

This post, the first in a series, details the author's experience building Bolt, a Java-style concurrent object-oriented programming language. It outlines the motivation behind creating a compiler, explaining the process using the analogy of a telegraph operator translating speech into Morse code. The author covers key compiler stages like lexing, parsing, type checking, and code generation, highlighting Bolt's advanced features such as objects, classes, inheritance, method overriding, concurrency, and generics. The article discusses static vs. dynamic typing and the role of LLVM, explaining how Bolt compiles to LLVM IR for optimization and machine code generation. Unique to Bolt is its double type-checking phase ensuring concurrent safety. The series promises a practical tutorial on building a compiler beyond toy languages.