How to Choose the Right Language for Creating Your Own Programming Language

Embarking on the journey of creating your own programming language is an exciting challenge, and one of the first critical decisions is choosing the language in which to build it. The consensus is that there's no single "best" language; the ideal choice depends on your specific goals, from rapid prototyping to building a high-performance, production-ready compiler.

For Rapid Prototyping and Ease of Use

If your goal is to quickly prototype ideas and focus on language design rather than low-level details, a high-level language like Python is a popular choice. Here's why:

Rich Library Ecosystem: Python has fantastic libraries specifically for parsing, such as Lark and PLY. Lark, in particular, is praised for its ease of use, allowing you to define a grammar in EBNF and automatically generate a parser.
Developer-Friendly Features: Python's garbage collection eliminates the need for manual memory management, a common hurdle in languages like C. Its dynamic typing and new match statement also make it incredibly convenient for dissecting and processing parse trees and abstract syntax trees (ASTs).
Prototyping Strategy: A common strategy is to first prototype the language in Python to finalize its features and semantics, and then, if performance becomes a priority, rewrite the core components in a faster language like C++, Rust, or C.

For Performance and System-Level Control

When performance is paramount, systems programming languages are the way to go. They offer fine-grained control over memory and execution, which is crucial for an efficient compiler or interpreter.

C/C++: The traditional choice for compiler construction. While C forces you to handle all memory bookkeeping yourself, C++ provides powerful tools to manage complexity. Libraries like Boost.Spirit, Boost.Parser, and lexy allow you to build parsers directly within C++ syntax, blending parsing logic seamlessly with your code.
Rust: A modern alternative that offers the performance of C++ but with a strong emphasis on memory safety. Its feature set, including rich enum types and pattern matching, makes it a natural fit for compiler development.

The Functional Programming Advantage

Languages in the ML family (like OCaml and Haskell) and those influenced by them (like Rust, Swift, and F#) are often cited as being exceptionally well-suited for writing compilers. This is due to a few key features:

Algebraic Data Types and Pattern Matching: These features are a perfect match for defining and manipulating ASTs. You can define the structure of your language's syntax as a set of types and then use pattern matching to elegantly and safely deconstruct and process the code.
Type Safety: A strong, static type system helps catch many bugs at compile time, which is invaluable in a complex project like a compiler.
Metaprogramming (Lisp and Racket): Languages like Lisp and Racket take a different approach. Their homoiconic nature (where code is represented as a data structure) makes it incredibly simple to write programs that manipulate other programs. Racket, in particular, is explicitly designed as a "language for creating languages."

Essential Tools and Considerations

Regardless of the language you choose, you'll likely interact with specialized tools:

Parser Generators: Tools like ANTLR can generate a parser for you in many different target languages (including Java, C#, Python, and JavaScript), saving you from writing one from scratch.
Compiler Backends: If you're building a compiled language and don't want to write your own machine code generator, LLVM is the industry standard. It provides a suite of tools and libraries for optimizing and compiling to a vast number of hardware architectures. Many languages have good LLVM bindings.
Interpreter vs. Compiler: The choice between building an interpreter or a compiler also influences your implementation language. An interpreter written in Python, for example, can easily leverage Python's extensive libraries, making them available to users of your new language.