Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop recommending the Dragon Book already. It is not just heavy, it is mostly outdated and irrelevant.
Please could you recommend an alternative?
Dick Grune - Modern Compiler Design
How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
61–70 of 128 posts
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#62Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop recommending the Dragon Book already. It is not just heavy, it is mostly outdated and irrelevant.
There's quite a few decent alternatives. I often suggest Wirth's Compiler Construction and Oberon sources because they're straightforward lessons plus give experience with Wirth style of simple, safe, efficient languages. Then, they can improve the Oberon System or compilers for personal projects and improvement. That said, I typically recommend compilers get written in an ML or LISP given it's so much easier to do i…
Yes, functional side of things is interesting and rarely covered in the standard compilers courses.
There is an old but good book, often overlooked: "Functional Programming" by Anthony J. Field and Peter G. Harrison (1988). Despite the title, it's more about various compilation techniques.
Also an old but still relevant (it is missing the STG, but otherwise full of interesting stuff): http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
It also worth following this blog: https://wingolog.org/
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#64Long ago UNIX had compiler writing tools like yacc and lex. I wonder if they are useful for exercises like this.
That's what I want to try next time. There are pros and cons in using the parser generator, but the tool seems to be useful at least if you want to create a small compiler which don't aim Clang-level diagnostics.
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#65For anyone interested in compiler writing and looking for a good resource to start, probably one of the best is the "Dragon Book": http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-... I highly recommend it, but it's heavy stuff. There are probably simpler guides out there that just cover the basics.
The Red Dragon Book is great (I like it better than the newer Purple edition), however for a gentler intro, I really like Crafting a Compiler[1] by Fischer et al.: the first chapter does a great job of introducing the role of each part of a "traditional" compiler and chapter two implements a complete compiler for a tiny calculator language. The rest of the book follows the traditional progression (scanner, parser, type checking, IR generation, etc.) It's a bit expensive, which is my only reservation when recommending it for a university class (although students are resourceful if you know what I mean ;))
[1] http://www.amazon.ca/Crafting-Compiler-Charles-N-Fischer/dp/...
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please stop recommending the Dragon Book already. It is not just heavy, it is mostly outdated and irrelevant.
There's quite a few decent alternatives. I often suggest Wirth's Compiler Construction and Oberon sources because they're straightforward lessons plus give experience with Wirth style of simple, safe, efficient languages. Then, they can improve the Oberon System or compilers for personal projects and improvement. That said, I typically recommend compilers get written in an ML or LISP given it's so much easier to do i…
I definitely agree with ML and OCaml, but why do you recommend Lisp for compiler work? I love working withs Lisps, but how do you deal with dynamic typing bugs in compiler work? I prefer OCaml/Haskell/ML for its really strong static type checking for compiler work. Just curious though...
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#67For anyone interested in compiler writing and looking for a good resource to start, probably one of the best is the "Dragon Book": http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-... I highly recommend it, but it's heavy stuff. There are probably simpler guides out there that just cover the basics.
Please stop recommending the Dragon Book already. It is not just heavy, it is mostly outdated and irrelevant.
I learned compilers this way and yes, it's extremely hard. Things got so high-level that I forgot what the real problem was and kept wondering why the algorithm I wrote isn't working.
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#68Honestly, the most difficult, time consuming, and mundane aspect to this project would have to be the parser, which was apparently written in C by hand. So bravo.
Getting to some of the final notes:
> ... I'd choose a different design than that if I were to write it again. Particularly, I'd use yacc instead of writing a parser by hand and introduce an intermediate language early on.
That's why I found the LALRPOP post by one of the Rust developers interesting. Writing your own parser generator is actually much easier than writing a parser by-hand (depending on the complexity of the language, here not that complex and still difficult), and I think it's more instructive than using a free or open parser-generator or compiler compiler. The downside is that it is less practical, because almost none of the important aspects of language implementation involve the parser.
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#69I really enjoyed reading this. It's informative, fun, and has a refreshingly honest tone. Too often, stories passed around by computer scientists entail clever solutions and elegant insight striking the protagonist like lightning in the hour of need. Rarely does the programmer express regret, make self-corrections, and confront fear and doubt along the way: >I should have written beautiful code from the beginning, bu…
There's a lot of this going on over at /r/adventofcode, people are abusing the hell out of languages just to get their answers as quickly as possible to make the leaderboard.
For those of you who don't know what Advent of Code is, think of it as the advent calendar you had as a child (you know that thing with the chocolate behind the paper doors?), except you get a new coding problem every day and you get stars instead.
Re: How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's quite a few decent alternatives. I often suggest Wirth's Compiler Construction and Oberon sources because they're straightforward lessons plus give experience with Wirth style of simple, safe, efficient languages. Then, they can improve the Oberon System or compilers for personal projects and improvement. That said, I typically recommend compilers get written in an ML or LISP given it's so much easier to do i…
I definitely agree with ML and OCaml, but why do you recommend Lisp for compiler work? I love working withs Lisps, but how do you deal with dynamic typing bugs in compiler work? I prefer OCaml/Haskell/ML for its really strong static type checking for compiler work. Just curious though...
LISP js easy to parse, transform, build clean-slate, verify, and do fast. My first 4GL tool was a BASIC w/ macros compatible with C and C++. When converted to LISP, it was vastly easier to do transforms and macros plus productivity boost with incremental, per-function compilation. Turns out, Julia did something similar by converting the source into AST's that are LISP expressions with compiler being femtolisp.
Far as safet, you can build checks into your code for protection or use a typed subset of LISP (eg Typed Racket). Shen goes further by embedding whole sequent calculus for custom, per app/module, type systems.
So, not saying LISP is ideal for compilers but does have some ideal and good attributes. Ocaml is my default given it combines conciseness, correctness, decent performance, ease of learning, and some helpful libs.