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Compiler Design in C

holub.com

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Re: Compiler Design in C

#41

Post by thorn »

userbinator wrote: post #26

This book appears to be more of a "compiler-compiler design in C"; it goes through how to write a lexer and parser generator, then writes a compiler using them, and I think the resulting compiler is a bit of a letdown: it does not much more than translate C into a linearised subset of C, and so the IMHO more "interesting" and important parts of the back-end like register allocation and instruction selection are compl…

Care to expose any good book explaining more modern approach for compilers from the practical point of view (including RD)?

Re: Compiler Design in C

#42

Post by userbinator »

thorn wrote: post #41
userbinator wrote: post #26

This book appears to be more of a "compiler-compiler design in C"; it goes through how to write a lexer and parser generator, then writes a compiler using them, and I think the resulting compiler is a bit of a letdown: it does not much more than translate C into a linearised subset of C, and so the IMHO more "interesting" and important parts of the back-end like register allocation and instruction selection are compl…

Care to expose any good book explaining more modern approach for compilers from the practical point of view (including RD)?

Practical Compiler Construction: http://www.t3x.org/reload/index.html

This explains the SubC compiler I mentioned in the original post.

Re: Compiler Design in C

#43

Post by nickik »

ltta wrote: post #32
nickik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The good intro to compilers is Engineering a Compiler. It focuse more on optimization then most intro books, and its all SSA. If you want to go all in on SSA optimization, there is a book called Static Single Assignment Book and its written by a hole list of compiler writers. Its not finished but there is still a lot of information. You can find it here: http://ssabook.gforge.inria.fr/latest/book.pdf Or you can go wi…

Speaking of SSA and optimizations, I just remembered that Andy Wingo (core contributor to Guile scheme) has a treasure trove of great articles, e.g. a fun intro to SSA [1] or CPS as used in Guile [2]. His blog is totally worth just browsing around. [1] http://wingolog.org/archives/2011/07/12/static-single-assign... [2] http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/01/12/a-continuation-passi...

Yes. His posts are a great. He is working on a VM and I do to so I follow his work closly.

Re: Compiler Design in C

#44

Post by makeset »

ltta wrote: post #2

If you are interested in a printed version of a great beginner's compiler book, I can highly recommend Andrew W. Appel's "Modern Compiler in C". There are also versions of the book written for SML or Java. I have read and partially implemented the C version and I really enjoyed the book, basic enough to follow yet full-featured enough to be useful. The book starts with parsing (I prefer PEG or Pratt parsers for their…

Great book, though I recommend the SML version over C or Java for a clearer illustration of the concepts in code. Viewed side by side, the SML code looks concise and obvious vs. the long and wordy C/Java code. It just seems to lend itself better to the task, in that some of the pattern matching burden is already handled by SML.

Re: Compiler Design in C

#45

Post by wglb »

userbinator wrote: post #26

This book appears to be more of a "compiler-compiler design in C"; it goes through how to write a lexer and parser generator, then writes a compiler using them, and I think the resulting compiler is a bit of a letdown: it does not much more than translate C into a linearised subset of C, and so the IMHO more "interesting" and important parts of the back-end like register allocation and instruction selection are compl…

This underscores what David Conroy used to say when writing the MWC compiler: Yacc makes the hard part harder and the easy part easier.

And I agree for all its thoroughly-written tutorial approach, I don't find myself going back to it very often.

Re: Compiler Design in C

#46

Post by ltta »

makeset wrote: post #44
ltta wrote: post #2

If you are interested in a printed version of a great beginner's compiler book, I can highly recommend Andrew W. Appel's "Modern Compiler in C". There are also versions of the book written for SML or Java. I have read and partially implemented the C version and I really enjoyed the book, basic enough to follow yet full-featured enough to be useful. The book starts with parsing (I prefer PEG or Pratt parsers for their…

Great book, though I recommend the SML version over C or Java for a clearer illustration of the concepts in code. Viewed side by side, the SML code looks concise and obvious vs. the long and wordy C/Java code. It just seems to lend itself better to the task, in that some of the pattern matching burden is already handled by SML.

Totally agree, ML-style languages are great for writing compilers.
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