There are a few approaches if you want to write a new language. One, as the author argues, is to write a library in an existing language, which may require sacrificing ergonomics to fit inside the syntax of the host language, but is safe, modular and reusable.

Many DSLs can be bolted onto an existing language with support for compiler extensions. This approach offers more flexibility, but often leads to fragmentation and poor interoperability in the language ecosystem.

There is third approach, established by a group in Minnesota [1], which is to design languages and tools which are modular and extensible from the get-go, so that extensions are more interoperable. They do research on how to make this work using attribute grammars.

If the host language has a sufficiently expressive type system, you can often get away with writing a fluent API [2] or type safe embedded DSL. But designing languages and type systems with good support for meta-programming is also an active area of research. [3, 4]

If none of these options work, the last resort is to start from tabula rasa and write your own parser, compiler, and developer tools. This offers the most flexibility, but requires an enormous amount of engineering, and generally is not recommended in 2026.

[1]: https://melt.cs.umn.edu

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.01473

[3]: https://www.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/~kam/papers/aplas2016.pdf

[4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.17065