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This course is asynchronously delivered. 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?
On the related note, what would you guys recommend as an introduction to compilers, say for beginners?
A fantastic submission, very much appreciated. I find the presentation style of subtitles with surrounding context extremely helpful. I often lose the ability to listen when concentrating; the subtitle context provides a superior recovery mechanism to the usual, try to work out what was missed. I look forward to purchasing augmented reality glasses at some point in the future which add this advantage to in-person int…
It’s the complete opposite of, and significantly more user friendly than, how zoom recordings synchronize meeting subtitles with audio/video playback.
In their case they only show the current line in a text message-like sidebar. As the content plays, it snaps the scroll position of the messages to current, hiding the rest. This breaks scrolling ahead or back while listening and you lose any context.
Hopefully I’m just missing a setting - I try to minimize the time I spend in there. Is there a way I can take their damn horse blinders off?
Domain-specific compilers are a bigger field, where there's more opportunity to do something interesting 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 in…
> 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 program into C. 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.
Front end is lexing, parsing, building the AST (in whole or just keeping pieces of it around), semantic analysis. When that is done, you can say "Yup, valid program. It is possible to generate code." So, to your question, yes. Those techniques from the course are 100% in play.
Back-end is turning the AST into something you can optimized and generate code from. (Sometimes there is a "middle-end" in there....) High-level optimizations, low level optimizations, memory allocation, register allocation.
Tooling is everything that keeps your life from being miserable as a user -- starting with debug symbols and these days people expect library and package management, etc, etc.
So if you are interested in exploring the Next Great Syntax or some semantic problems that can be re-written into C, then doing a C-front is a great way to do that. Let the C compiler handle all the really-really-really-hard back-end issues for you, and avoid all that distraction. But.... expect that getting debug symbols from your spiffy language into the ready-to-link object file is going to be, as they say, "non-trivial". So... great for experiments and a great learning exercise, but it's hard to do a production compiler that way.
On the related note, what would you guys recommend as an introduction to compilers, say for beginners?
But what is a "PhD level course"? All I've seen is undergrad and graduate, and the difference between masters and PhD has nothing to do with classes.
On the related note, what would you guys recommend as an introduction to compilers, say for beginners?
Further readings: Book recommendations in https://github.com/MattPD/cpplinks/blob/master/compilers.md#... as well as program analysis resources (in particular lattice theory, type systems and programming languages theory, related notation): https://gist.github.com/MattPD/00573ee14bf85ccac6bed3c0678dd...
Courses: I can recommend the following: https://github.com/MattPD/cpplinks/blob/master/compilers.md#...
Particularly (in alphabetical order--I think these are all great, so including highlights of what I've liked about them):
- IU P423/P523: Compilers (Programming Language Implementation) - Jeremy Siek, with the course book "Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach" (pretty interesting approach, with programming language features developed incrementally having a fully working compiler at each step, cf. http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf; implementation language Racket),
- KAIST CS420: Compiler Design - Jeehoon Kang (good modern treatment of SSA representation itself, including the use of block arguments, https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Rationale/Rationale/#block-argume..., as well as SSA-based analysis and optimization; Rust as an implementation language),
- UCSD CSE 131: Compiler Construction - Joseph Gibbs Politz, Ranjit Jhala (great lecturers, both Haskell and OCaml edition were interesting; fun extra: one of the Fall 2019 lectures (11/26) has an interesting discussion of the trade-offs between traditional OOP and FP compiler implementation),
- UCSD CSE 231: Advanced Compiler Design - Sorin Lerner (after UCSD CSE 131: for more on analysis & optimization--data flow analysis, lattice theory, SSA, optimization; fun extra: the final Winter 2018 lecture highlighted one of my favorite papers, https://pldi15.sigplan.org/details/pldi2015-papers/31/Provab...),
- UW CSE CSEP 501: Compilers - Hal Perkins (nice balanced introduction, including x86-64 assembly code generation, with the aforementioned "Engineering a Compiler" used as the course textbook).
The course materials look good. But what is a "PhD level course"? All I've seen is undergrad and graduate, and the difference between masters and PhD has nothing to do with classes.
huh ? what's your education system ? in europe it's generally 3 year bachelor, then 2 year masters, then 3 years phd so when you have classes during your phd hopefully they are different that the one you get during your masters