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This is one of my favorite books(-in-progress) to follow along with. If you've ever even had a passing curiosity in how interpreters work, I highly recommend checking it out from the beginning: http://craftinginterpreters.com/welcome.html The writing is charming and approachable, while still packed with an impressive amount of knowledge.
Any more gems like this you would recommend?
Introduction to Compilers and Language Design by Douglas Thain
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Another approach is to do the opposite - always store all local variables in the heap, and rely on scalar replacement of aggregates to put them back onto the stack where possible. This is what I do in my Ruby interpreter. That’s definitely not compatible with a single-pass though!
Very interesting! Have you written anything about your implementation? I'm always keen to learn new techniques. I don't have much back end optimization experience (yet).
> We ensure this by forcing an escape analysis ... of the array containing the values of local variables. This eliminates every access to the array and instead connects the read of the variable with the last write. ... After conversion to SSA form, guest-language local variables have no performance disadvantage compared to host language local variables.
Then if the closure escapes (stored into the heap or something), the escape analysis just naturally fails and the frame is stored on the heap again.
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Any more gems like this you would recommend?
“Compiler Construction” by Niklaus Wirth (2014) [pdf] https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/... Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, C and ML. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ From Nand to Tetris https://www.nand2tetris.org/
This is one of my favorite books(-in-progress) to follow along with. If you've ever even had a passing curiosity in how interpreters work, I highly recommend checking it out from the beginning: http://craftinginterpreters.com/welcome.html The writing is charming and approachable, while still packed with an impressive amount of knowledge.
Any more gems like this you would recommend?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Compiler Construction” by Niklaus Wirth (2014) [pdf] https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/CompilerConstruction/... Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, C and ML. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ From Nand to Tetris https://www.nand2tetris.org/
Niklaus Wirth's, "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", is also a great read for the last chapter, "Language Structures and Compilers", which is a nice succinct read. It provides a little more formalism than Crafting Interpreters and it's introduction of representing grammar as a syntax diagram was especially helpful for me to visually understand the challenges of having more than 1 token of lookahead in LL(k) pa…
But it's just a beautiful, succinct book. If you get tired of how messy, fast-moving, and chaotic a lot of software development can be, it's a delightful respite. It cleanses and orders the mind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Niklaus Wirth's, "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", is also a great read for the last chapter, "Language Structures and Compilers", which is a nice succinct read. It provides a little more formalism than Crafting Interpreters and it's introduction of representing grammar as a syntax diagram was especially helpful for me to visually understand the challenges of having more than 1 token of lookahead in LL(k) pa…
Yes. I love this book. At a practical level, it's pretty (very) outdated. It talks about things like sorting when your data is stored on tape. But it's just a beautiful, succinct book. If you get tired of how messy, fast-moving, and chaotic a lot of software development can be, it's a delightful respite. It cleanses and orders the mind.
Author here! Happy to answer questions, accept criticism, etc. :)
Author here! Happy to answer questions, accept criticism, etc. :)
It's perhaps also too different, but I'd be interested in ways of saving the state of program execution and restoring that state later. Different from continuations, but overlaps...