Architecture of Various Interpreters - oils-for-unix/oils GitHub Wiki

Bash and all shells I've looked at: lexer/parser -> AST -> tree interpreter.

• (but note that they do dynamic parsing too)

CPython: parser -> parse tree -> "transformer" -> AST -> compiler -> graph of bytecode objects -> bytecode assembler -> .pyc files -> bytecode interpreter.

Lua: No tree representation! It constructs bytecode for a register machine while parsing. I believe this style came from Pascal compilers.

R: It was a tree interpreter, but they added bytecode around 2011.

Ruby: I believe the same is true; it was a tree interpreter, but they added bytecode.

Next Generation Shell: PEG parser -> AST -> bytecode