Introduction to Compilers and Language Design (2021) (dthain.github.io)

Love such topics and articles in midst of AI topics/noise.

Sometimes I see people who design languages and build compilers, and I find them truly amazing. I once tried making a language myself because I was curious, but it was so difficult that I just settled for a simple C backend. The people contributing to LLVM probably know everything down to assembly generation. they're truly incredible.

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Took Dr. Thain's compilers class in college! It was the best. He's an excellent instructor, and the course project made me build a working C-style compiler step by step. I think the sample project here is pretty much the project we did; highly recommend following through the entire thing!

it wanders within a tight circle around C and its idiosyncrasies.

Good read. Impressive how ot sharpens past knowledge with great examples.

Just scannning the table of contents and I don't see any of the major topics of language design. It seems to be more like just "intro to compilers"

According to the introduction, the dragon book is at an advanced graduate level?

Related:

Introduction to Compilers and Language Design (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31388741 - May 2022 (68 comments)

Introduction to Compilers and Language Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728749 - April 2019 (1 comment)

I don't know if any courses have referenced it yet, but I think C4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822) and C4x86 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746054) would make for a great semester's worth of study; it's a tiny, self-compiling C-subset compiler that would probably make a good base for further exercises in extending it.

This was a great read for me. I'm working on a DSL compiler for 3D printing (after my semester class on compilers) and it's a good reminder of how much there is to learn. It's given me great material on error handling suggestions and constant folding (although mine is not at such an advanced level). I read Chapter 12 on optimization, and it's given me a lot of good ideas in terms of tree rewriting and reducing instruction count. I implemented paging (after much research) but I still deal with crashes partly because the output is still built as a giant string in memory for smaller outputs, and partly because the paging threshold sometimes doesn't trigger early enough. Perhaps there are deeper things for me to optimize and research on. I'm keeping this read under my belt!

I really enjoyed Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom and found it valuable for the development of a DSL I'm working on.

From https://craftinginterpreters.com/:

> Crafting Interpreters contains everything you need to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You’ll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. It’s a blast.

The book is available for free on the website: https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html