I am curious about how to create a programming language based on JVM so I have tried to get some info online, but the information I got are quite fragmented. What I found are mostly information related to single technologies like ASM, Eclipse JDT, JFlex, etc, but what I would like to know are the main steps that need to be implemented and suggested technologies for these steps.
Any idea?
Well this question sounds quite broad but I started to think that is not like that. I kept looking up information online and you can get (relative easily) a basic customized language just using ANTLR (or alternative like JavaCC) used by Groovy mixing it with ASM (alternative BCEL or same Javac compiler). The first helps you to build the necessary grammar/parsing/AST and the second to generate the final bytecode once you got a successful parsing.
BTW from the same author of ANTLR I found this book that more and less is what I was looking for:
http://pragprog.com/book/tpdsl/language-implementation-patterns
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1) specify a grammar for your language
2) write or generate code that parses to that grammar
3) build an abstract syntax tree
4) perform optimisations (optional)
5) compile to JVM bytecode. The JVM spec is here
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