Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

Question for students: how do you find synchronous courses with some discussions during class, vs asynchronous courses where discussions are limited to an online written forum or office hours?

Take C (or some other language) and its mature optimizing compilers as a foundation, and write a program that compiles a high-level description of a domain-specific program into C

For example, NN-512 (https://NN-512.com) is a compiler that takes as input a simple text description of a convolutional neural net inference graph and produces as output a stand-alone C implementation of that graph

GNU Bison (https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/) is another example, where the output is a parser: Bison reads a specification of a context-free language, warns about any parsing ambiguities, and generates a parser (either in C, C++, or Java) which reads sequences of tokens and decides whether the sequence conforms to the syntax specified by the grammar

Halide (https://halide-lang.org/) is a language for fast, portable computation on images and tensors, and it originally generated human-readable C++ code as output (but not anymore, now it feeds directly into LLVM)

Can anyone provide other examples? (Code generators for network packet processing?)

Don't you still need many of the techniques taught in this class to build something like that? The material doesn't look inherently targeted at low-level languages or machine-code as a target.

“Real 6120 also has an end-of-semester course project—in the self-guided version, your end-of-semester assignment is to change the world through the magic of compilers”