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Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

cs.cornell.edu

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Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#131

Post by philosopher1234 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #117
bachmeier wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d like to sit down all university professors who teach compiler courses and teach them a course on what’s relevant. I don't teach compiler courses, but I'm an academic, and I do keep in touch with industry people to find out what's important for my data analysis course. A couple of big problems with your proposal: 1. Time variation in "what industry wants". This year one thing's hot, the next year it's something…

ibains made a specific point about language processing in IDEs being different to that of (traditional) compilers. Presumably there exists a state-of-the-art there just as there's a state-of-the-art for conventional compilers, but academia doesn't give it as much attention.

Which is still countered by:

2. Cross sectional variation. There's no such thing as "what industry wants". Every place wants something different, with only a small subset common to 80% of employers.

No?

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#132

Post by morelisp »

ibains wrote: post #59

I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers. I can’t hire compiler people with right skills. We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators. These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good lu…

As someone who is happy when he interviews a candidate who at least knows you don't start parsing with `string.split()` I gotta say, your bar is extremely high. Surely MSFT can afford some internal training?

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#133

Post by waynesonfire »

mafribe wrote: post #126
ibains wrote: post #59

I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers. I can’t hire compiler people with right skills. We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators. These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good lu…

I understand the problem. I teach compilers at a big university. And I would love to hire graduates with compiler skills for my startup, but find it difficult. There are several structural problems that conspire to keep students from acquiring knowledge in low-level programming domain like compilation: a course needs to fit with the rest of the curriculum, and with student interest. I cannot get students interested i…

I never took a compilers class during university study and it is my greatest regret. I've since been self learning and it hasn't been easy.

Thanks for advocating for the importance of compilers. This lack of knowledge has been a limiter for me many times. I'd really like to fill a skill gap and be able to write a DSL or a little language to solve a problem.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#134

Post by IshKebab »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #125
morelisp wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partial parse state and recovery are critical. You don't want the entire bottom half of a file to lose semantic analysis while the programmer figures out what to put before a closing ).

Does that issue go away if you use packrat vs some other means?

Yes. Go and look up Tree Sitter and its references.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#135

Post by ritter2a »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #4

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…

AnyDSL (https://anydsl.github.io/) might be worth mentioning, it is a framework for creating domain specific languages using partial evaluation to give powerful abstractions to the user while still producing high-performance code for different target platforms. On the website, you can find that they already have DSLs for ray tracing and image stencil codes as well as works for bioinformatics.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#136

Post by mafribe »

waynesonfire wrote: post #133
mafribe wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the problem. I teach compilers at a big university. And I would love to hire graduates with compiler skills for my startup, but find it difficult. There are several structural problems that conspire to keep students from acquiring knowledge in low-level programming domain like compilation: a course needs to fit with the rest of the curriculum, and with student interest. I cannot get students interested i…

I never took a compilers class during university study and it is my greatest regret. I've since been self learning and it hasn't been easy. Thanks for advocating for the importance of compilers. This lack of knowledge has been a limiter for me many times. I'd really like to fill a skill gap and be able to write a DSL or a little language to solve a problem.

From my experience in industry, while hardly any programmer will ever need to write a modern code generator, few things are more useful in practise than being able quickly to design a suitable DSL and implement a corresponding performant and correct lexer and parser. This is not something that can easily be picked up on the side.

In addition, understanding what happens under-the-hood when you program in a high-level language is an eye-opening experience for many students. This sentiment comes up in student evaluations year-in, year-out.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#137

Post by MaxBarraclough »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #131
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ibains made a specific point about language processing in IDEs being different to that of (traditional) compilers. Presumably there exists a state-of-the-art there just as there's a state-of-the-art for conventional compilers, but academia doesn't give it as much attention.

Which is still countered by: 2. Cross sectional variation. There's no such thing as "what industry wants". Every place wants something different, with only a small subset common to 80% of employers. No?

I don't think that really holds up. Ultimately you could say this about any small mismatch between desired skill-sets and those available, but at some point we call it hair-splitting.

If you need someone to build a parser for your IDE, you're presumably better off with an expert in traditional compilers, than with someone who knows nothing at all of language processing. You'd be better off still with someone experienced in language processing within IDEs. Less mismatch is better, even if it's impractical to insist on no mismatch at all.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#138

Post by pwdisswordfish4 »

mafribe wrote: post #126
ibains wrote: post #59

I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers. I can’t hire compiler people with right skills. We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators. These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good lu…

I understand the problem. I teach compilers at a big university. And I would love to hire graduates with compiler skills for my startup, but find it difficult. There are several structural problems that conspire to keep students from acquiring knowledge in low-level programming domain like compilation: a course needs to fit with the rest of the curriculum, and with student interest. I cannot get students interested i…

Your HN profile is empty, so there seems to be no good way to check out your institution's program or to contact you.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#139

Post by satthrow »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #39
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are various weird and wonderful niche languages out there, if you appreciate programming languages as an end in themselves. Two examples: Sentient [0] and Factor [1][2]. [0] https://sentient-lang.org/ [1] https://factorcode.org/ [2] Factor's home-page does a poor job of presenting examples to give a flavour for the language, so here's one on GitHub: https://github.com/factor/factor/blob/master/basis/roman/rom..…

Sentient looks neat! Does it use the same strategies as Prolog under the hood?

> The MiniSat solver is Sentient’s default. It is a version of MiniSat that has been compiled to JavaScript with Emscripten. This means that it can run in a web browser and it does not have any dependencies when run from the command-line.

Re: Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course

#140

Post by markus_zhang »

mafribe wrote: post #126
ibains wrote: post #59

I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers. I can’t hire compiler people with right skills. We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators. These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good lu…

I understand the problem. I teach compilers at a big university. And I would love to hire graduates with compiler skills for my startup, but find it difficult. There are several structural problems that conspire to keep students from acquiring knowledge in low-level programming domain like compilation: a course needs to fit with the rest of the curriculum, and with student interest. I cannot get students interested i…

Thanks. I'm actually very interested in lexing and parsing, because that's probably 99% of the stuff a layman-programmer gets to do with compiler theory in job. I mean not everyone gets chance to write the backend part, but parsing skill is almost used universally.
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