Language Internals¶

The layer beneath the syntax — how programming languages actually work under the hood, language-agnostic where possible and concretely specified where the implementations diverge.

Sections¶

• Concurrency — threading models, primitives, async runtimes, race conditions, deadlock detection.
• Memory Management — stack vs heap, allocators, GC strategies (mark-sweep, generational, reference counting), escape analysis, ownership models.
• Type Systems — static vs dynamic, structural vs nominal, generics, variance, type inference, soundness.
• Compilers and Interpreters — lexing, parsing, AST, IR, optimisation passes, codegen, JIT vs AOT, runtime interplay.
• Metaprogramming — reflection, macros (hygienic vs textual), code generation, build-time vs runtime.

Related¶

• Code Craft — how to apply these internals well at the source level.
• Quality Engineering › Performance — the practical payoff of understanding internals.
• Languages — per-language tracks where these internals get concrete.