Learning to write a compiler
stackoverflow.com
Learning to write a compiler
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#2I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers.
I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler (even a mock one).
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#3I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
Yes. I bought and read it out of interest rather than a desire to actually build a compiler. As long as you're OK with set theory and general math notation, it's not a particularly tricky read, and you get to learn a lot of cool stuff about automata/state machines in an applied, practical sense.
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#4I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
I had trouble getting through much of it, even though I tend to read technical books for fun. Lisp in Small Pieces or the Lambda Papers are more educational and easier to read. They will change the way you think about programming far more than the Dragon book.
The dragon book is okay as a comprehensive reference, but is bad at communicating the central idea of anything. You might want to skim it, looking for topics that interest you, then seek out several sources for those topics and see which clicks for you. If you start reading the Dragon book from page 1, you risk getting bogged down.
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#5The interesting thing about compiler writing is the drastic reduction in complexity that's happened. There are essentially off-the-shelf tools that can be used to handle everything before semantic analysis and everything after conversion to a reasonably high-level IR. This has dramatically reduced the cost of language experimentation; it's now feasible to bang out a new language in a day or two (assuming you're familiar with yacc, LLVM, etc.), and generate efficient code on a number of target architectures.
These tools mean that "learning to write a compiler" can take several different paths; on the one hand, we could learn about how each of these tools work (e.g. "how to write a parser generator", "machine-independent optimizations", "code generation", etc.). This is the approach taken by the dragon book. This gives the background theory and mathematics behind compiler-writing (and will likely be something people need to know if they want to write for instance an LLVM optimization pass). The problem with this is that, because of the trends mentioned above, it has little to do with the day-to-day of actual compiler writing and language experimentation (this is only somewhat true, since most "real" compilers will have a custom-written frontend and at least a little bit of knowledge about the target architecture).
The other approach is to use pre-written tools, to focus on language design decisions and applications. To be honest I'm not familiar with any resources that do this particularly well. This is the approach taken by most of the "we're going to build a compiler!" websites mentioned on the Stack Overflow post. This approach is probably more useful for most of the people who want to "write a compiler", but it leaves people with a very shallow knowledge of what's happening beneath the surface of the APIs they use.
I don't mean to imply that one of these approaches is "better" than the other (and indeed, the second requires a little bit of the first - it's difficult to debug an automatically generated parser without knowing at least a little bit of the theory), but it's important to know which approach you're aiming for, and trying to optimize based on that goal. Going to the Dragon book as a "how-to" is a disaster waiting to happen.
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#6I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
If you're interested in language design also may I suggest,
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Implementation-Patterns-Domai... and http://www.amazon.com/Language-Implementation-Patterns-Domai...
There are also some programmers around who are going through the process of designing and implementing their own languages, you can watch their progress and ideas. Here is 1(2?) examples, Magpie and Finch by munificent. http://bitbucket.org/munificent
It seems Magpie has started out using a C# compiler/interpreter but now uses Java?
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#7I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
Do you want to build a compiler or design a programming language? The Dragon Book is pretty heavy on implementation details if you just want a taste without building one.
If you're just getting started in mechanical program transformation, I strongly recommend using something like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and its meta-circular evaluator to get the basics without the grunge of parsing and generation.
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#8The top comment has a remarkably good list of references. I like the nanopass and incremental papers a lot, RTT is a classic, and there were several good-looking references I had never seen. Almost makes me feel some jealousy at the pleasant vertigo the original poster must feel :)
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#9I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
Do you want to build a compiler or design a programming language? The Dragon Book is pretty heavy on implementation details if you just want a taste without building one. If you're just getting started in mechanical program transformation, I strongly recommend using something like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and its meta-circular evaluator to get the basics without the grunge of parsing and gene…
It is possible to skip the first half of the Dragon Book if you are not interested in front-end stuff. (I am not.) Chapters 8 and onward are far more interesting IMO. You will encounters topics such as SSA, data-flow analysis, points-to analysis, binary-decision diagrams, call graphs, Datalog, etc.
Re: Learning to write a compiler
#10I'm upvoting this just to hopefully start a discussion and hear more about this topic from fellow HNers. I hear the Dragon Book mentioned almost daily around here; I'm intrigued. Do you think this book could be read by someone who's not actually interested in writing a compiler? Does the book stand by itself? I'm interested in reading it, but I don't really think I have the motivation to start writing my own compiler…
I had trouble getting through much of it, even though I tend to read technical books for fun. Lisp in Small Pieces or the Lambda Papers are more educational and easier to read. They will change the way you think about programming far more than the Dragon book. The dragon book is okay as a comprehensive reference, but is bad at communicating the central idea of anything. You might want to skim it, looking for topics t…
I definitely would not recommend starting from page 1. You can pick at it gradually. Personally, I've gravitated more toward the second half of the book where it gets far more interesting. (I have the 2nd edition, where coverage of the back-end is vastly improved.)