Thorsten Ball
Author & Systems Engineer
Author of the acclaimed books 'Writing An Interpreter In Go' and 'Writing A Compiler In Go'. Staff software engineer and researcher studying AI coding harnesses, LLM evaluation for programming languages, and compiler-level optimizations for agentic code modification.
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
Writing An Interpreter and Compiler In Go
Authored two landmark engineering books used by university curricula and tens of thousands of systems engineers worldwide to learn lexing, parsing, AST generation, and bytecode virtual machines.
Focuses on language implementation theory rather than modern JIT compiler optimizations.
Context: Go, lexer/parser construction, tree-walking interpreters, bytecode compilers.
View missionEvaluating LLM Code Generation with Abstract Syntax Tree Validation
Developed methodologies for benchmarking AI coding assistants using compiler AST validation and deterministic unit test harnesses, identifying syntax failure modes in LLM code diffing.
Syntactic correctness does not guarantee semantic alignment or absence of subtle runtime edge-case bugs.
Context: AST parsing, tree-sitter integration, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o code completion.
View mission