I also tried building my own programming language, and I think the difficulty depends a lot on how far you want to take it.
At first, when I used C as the transpiler target, it felt relatively manageable. But once I tried to support a different backend, the difficulty increased dramatically. It is now a project I work on seriously with LLMs, and my impression is that making a language is both easier than expected and harder than expected.
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I also tried building my own programming language, and I think the difficulty depends a lot on how far you want to take it.
At first, when I used C as the transpiler target, it felt relatively manageable. But once I tried to support a different backend, the difficulty increased dramatically. It is now a project I work on seriously with LLMs, and my impression is that making a language is both easier than expected and harder than expected.