Built a tiny interpreter from scratch in C to understand how they work
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Hi HN, I'm the author.I built this project for two simple reasons: I've always used higher-level languages and wanted to finally understand what's happening "under the hood" of an interpreter. I also wanted a real project to force me to "power up" my C skills, especially with manual memory management and reference counting.The result is ToyForth, a minimal interpreter for a Forth-like language, written from scratch in C, stack-based.I focused on making the code clean and understandable. It's broken down into a few simple parts:A parser that turns source text into a list of objects (parser.c).A small stack-based virtual machine (main.c).A manual reference counting system (incRef/decRef) to manage object memory (mem.c) and so on.My main goal was learning, but I've tried to document it well in the README.md so it could be a "starter kit" for anyone else who wants to learn by reading a small, complete implementation.It's easy to try out. I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback on my approach or my C code.Here's the link: https://github.com/renvins/toyforth-interpreter
HN · launched Nov 12, 2025 · 5 upvotes (top 90%) · 0 views
Niche: programming languages and interpreters · 161 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -75% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 161 launches in programming languages and interpreters →
Could you build this?
Partial While AI can generate textbook lexers and recursive-descent parsers in C, writing a robust C interpreter with proper manual memory management and AST evaluation requires solid systems programming fundamentals to avoid memory leaks and segmentation faults.
What it would actually take: A C interpreter requires a lexer, a Pratt or recursive descent parser, an AST definition, an environment/symbol table, an evaluator, and custom memory management (such as an arena allocator or mark-and-sweep garbage collector). Specialized knowledge of compiler design and C memory safety is required to build a reliable implementation.
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Competitors
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Launched 12 days after the earliest competitor.
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