It's always interesting to see how different people approach the problems in their own language or relative isolation. I agree with others here, the real value of the original work lies in avoiding copy and paste.
Lox must have the highest ratio of (implementations : production usage) of any language on the planet. And I mean that as the highest praise -- it's proven a fantastic teaching language, and your book is infectious at encouraging others to jump in and follow along in various different languages.
I've also found the exercise of implementing Lox in another language as highly instructive in learning how to write idiomatic code in that language. I continue to learn more about the best way to express patterns as I work on my own implementation. I'd recommend the journey to any professional developer for this side-benefit alone.
> Lox must have the highest ratio of (implementations :
> production usage) of any language on the planet.
It's probably up there, for sure! But I'd guess that there are a million toy Lisp implementations, and more people are interested in writing a FORTH interpreter than actually using one in production. So I'd guess if we tried to get statistics it wouldn't be at the top.
Though there's probably a similar claim to be made for the Monkey-language from Torsten Bell, via his books on compilers and interpreters.
On a more serious note, have you thought about trying to aim lightning at the same spot again and write another book about implementing something most programmers take for granted?
I've definitely thought about writing a third book. I don't know if it would be about "something most programmers take for granted". I'm more interested in writing about whatever happens to excite me the most at that time.
I may be projecting, but I feel like the kind of person to get excited about crafting interpreters wod also get excited about crafting databases or OSes.
That's so many languages and implementations that this could be used as a new Programming Language Popularity Ranking, with a bias towards languages people want to use or learn :D.
There's at least one other Rust implementation of lox that I know of (https://github.com/tdp2110/crafting-interpreters-rs) (no unsafe)
It's always interesting to see how different people approach the problems in their own language or relative isolation. I agree with others here, the real value of the original work lies in avoiding copy and paste.