Cedar

Hey — Nishil here.

Cedar is still one of my favorite things I’ve built. A small statically-typed language, and a compiler for it in Go — lexing, parsing, types, all the way down to LLVM IR and a real native executable.

I built it before the AI-assisted era. No Cursor, no Copilot, and ChatGPT wasn’t yet something you could lean on for working compiler code. I had never written Go. I had never built a compiler. I didn’t really know what an AST was when I started. I learned all of it on the way.

That’s why it stuck. Not because Cedar is a language anyone should adopt, but because I didn’t know if I could do it, and then I did — from source text to a binary I could run.

The code and a longer walkthrough live on GitHub. If you like compilers, or you’re about to write your first one, starring the repo means a lot.