Oh, compiler construction :) I really enjoyed that lecture during my M.Sc.
"parallelization, just-in-time compilation, and garbage collection" sound fun, too. Especially JIT.
Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
41–50 of 241 posts
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#42Anyone interested in following the course together during the holidays? To keep each other motivated etc.
I’m interested. I may not have the most relevant background, though — I’m a data scientist with an econometrics education. The topic really does interest me, though.
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#43Any idea if I can jump right into this after my only experience being Crafting Interpreters?
Of course. Why not?
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#44Anyone interested in following the course together during the holidays? To keep each other motivated etc.
I’m interested. I may not have the most relevant background, though — I’m a data scientist with an econometrics education. The topic really does interest me, though.
I'm a devops engineer. So not very related either!
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, it's typically a 4 year undergrad, 2 year masters, and a ~5-7 year PhD depending on the program itself. From what I understand, while there are some classes you take as a PhD student, a majority of your work is doing research
For PhD students, the masters is integrated into the 5 years they spend doing their PhD. They are expected to take courses as a "pre-candidate" and do primarily research after they pass their qualifying exams and become candidates.
This is usually true but not always. I attended an economics program with a terminal master’s offering, and we spent a year and a half as master’s students before moving on to PhD work.
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
I am in the US, and at my school masters and PhD students all take the same classes. It is not ideal because many of the masters students are coming from a non-CS background. Some of the graduate level CS courses I have taken were easier than 4th year level undergrad classes.
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Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in the US, and at my school masters and PhD students all take the same classes. It is not ideal because many of the masters students are coming from a non-CS background. Some of the graduate level CS courses I have taken were easier than 4th year level undergrad classes.
This tracks well with my experience also. I was disappointed, for the most part, the several graduate CS courses for this reason.
By the time I'd finished graduate classes, I had a hard time with proofs. After the 10th or 12th introduction to predicate logic with slightly different notation, it just all becomes a big, confusing mass.
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#48Anyone interested in following the course together during the holidays? To keep each other motivated etc.
Yes! How should we organize this? Maybe start with an IRC channel?
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
One way to think of it is to split the "compiler" problem into three big pieces. 1) Front-end, 2) back-end, 3) tooling. 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 th…
Hi! This course is about the "middle end," FWIW. We do not do parsing or codegen in 6120, and there is no goal (as there is in many undergrad-level compilers courses) of making a complete, end-to-end compiler for a C-like language.
Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course
#50The 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.
> 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
I honestly have never figured out European education systems. Sorry!
But this is Cornell, which I assume is like other research-oriented US universities. You have a 4 (or maybe 5) year undergraduate, leading to a Bachelors and then apply to graduate programs. The graduate schools may have specific Masters tracks, but not really any general Masters program. Instead, you spend the first year or two taking graduate classes until you either satisfy the assorted requirements or pass an oral qualification (They still have those, right?), after which you focus entirely on research, publications, and your dissertation defense. If you leave school before defending, you get the Masters as a sort of consolation prize---most US PhDs in my experience don't have Masters.