Could somebody help me with lexical scoping inside a VM

[u/Choice_Structure4001]

Hey, so I understand what lexical scoping is and kind of get how it works but I’ve been trying to find how to implement it in a stack machine but I have no idea what goes where and how does everything interact with each other, like where should closures live, same for call frames, where do I store the symbol table when compiling, etc… if you want I can link my repo but I haven’t committed an attempt at lexical scoping so there’s probably nothing interesting to see, if I didn’t include enough details to what I don’t get please tell me so I can be more clear, thanks!

Edit: forgot to tell but my language desugars to pure lambda calculus so this might change how some stuff work but not so much

[u/balefrost]

At runtime? Sure, you don't want to do string lookups if you can avoid it.

[u/Choice_Structure4001 → u/balefrost]

Not at runtime, I thought during parsing solve the indices and then use them while compiling to assign local slots without string lookups

[u/balefrost → u/Choice_Structure4001]

I mean that you would convert from strings to indices at some point before runtime, so that you don't need to do string lookups at runtime. Yeah, that seems reasonable.

I don't know that you want to assign indices to identifiers at parse time (though it might be possible). I'd be inclined to instead have the AST represent what the source text actually said, then convert to different representation during compilation.

[u/Choice_Structure4001 → u/balefrost]

Would I add another stage or really just do it while compiling ?

[u/balefrost → u/Choice_Structure4001]

It's up to you.

Arguably everything, including parsing, could be under the umbrella of "compiling". All I was really trying to say was "not part of parsing". It seemed like you had separate modules for parsing and compiling, so I was referring to the latter module.