COSCUP 2026 - Conference for Open Source Coders, Users, and Promoters

Ever dreamed of creating your own programming language? This talk walks through the real journey — from building a Mermaid-to-ASCII compiler as a warm-up, to designing Homun, a language that transpiles to Rust. You'll learn the compiler pipeline (tokenizer → parser → AST → codegen), why transpiling beats writing a full compiler, and the hard design lessons: auto-detection traps, syntax iteration pain, and why hemi-self-hosting keeps things sane. Practical takeaways for anyone curious about language design in the AI era.