No matter what kind of PL you are doing, there’s no better way to get a feel for how it works than to have an implementation you can play with. These days, it’s easier than ever to build a “full featured” language that includes IDE support, beautiful output, and an interactive web playground. Nicholas Matsakis will give an opinionated tour through some of the options available, along with observations about what it’s like to develop PL for a living.

Nicholas Matsakis is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and co-lead of the Rust language design team. He has been working on Rust since 2011, with a focus on its type system and compiler implementation. He did his undergraduate study at MIT, graduating in 2001, and later obtained a PhD in 2011, working with Thomas Gross at ETH Zurich.