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My first fifteen compilers

composition.al

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Re: My first fifteen compilers

#11

Post by laumars »

kornish wrote: post #2

Favorite quote: > There’s a wealth of tutorials, courses, books, and the like about how to write compilers. But if somebody believes that writing a transpiler isn’t fundamentally the same thing as writing a compiler, it may not occur to them to look at any of that material. The basic argument is this: "compiler" isn't a term that needs to be limited from transforming a high-level input to a low-level output. Any prog…

Agreed. I had the same thing writing the parser for my $SHELL. The output was never going to be machine code since the bulk of the code would consist of pipelining external processes and spawning subshells. So the output of "compiler" is an AST-like memory structure with an order of process and tokens for parameters. However I still found following tutorials about compiler design immensely helpful since the problems I faced were largely the same even though the output generated was vastly different.

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#13

Post by shakna »

kornish wrote: post #2

Favorite quote: > There’s a wealth of tutorials, courses, books, and the like about how to write compilers. But if somebody believes that writing a transpiler isn’t fundamentally the same thing as writing a compiler, it may not occur to them to look at any of that material. The basic argument is this: "compiler" isn't a term that needs to be limited from transforming a high-level input to a low-level output. Any prog…

> But if somebody believes that writing a transpiler isn’t fundamentally the same thing as writing a compiler,

I'd be surprised if anyone did.

The use of transpiler is more about audience expectation, a specificity.

It's shorter than writing "source-to-source compiler", and acknowledges compiler as its superset, right there in its name

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#14

Post by GarvielLoken »

http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/a-tree-walk-interpreter.... This link has been up a long time ago on hackernews, or reddit, can't remember which. But i am trying to work through it, it has good basic explanation.

And then you have SICP which introduces compilers without really talking about it :p.

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#15

Post by nils-m-holm »

eighthnate wrote: post #10
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

I'd strongly suggest diving into compilers if you've never studied the subject. Learning a bit on the subject unlocks a ton of incredibly useful skills. That knowledge helps you implement stuff like autocomplete, linters, syntax highlighting, etc. The Super Tiny Compiler [0] is a very gentle introduction to the subject. It's great because it helps you quickly develop an initial mental model. To give an everyday usage…

If people find getting started on a compiler to be a bit too intimidating, one good way to get your feet wet is implementing an interpreter for small subset of a language. Perhaps the basic arithmetic part of adding/multiplying/dividing integers.

People finding compilers intimidating is exactly my audience. :)

http://www.t3x.org/t3x/book.html

Please excuse the shameless plug!

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#16

Post by candiodari »

eighthnate wrote: post #10
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

I'd strongly suggest diving into compilers if you've never studied the subject. Learning a bit on the subject unlocks a ton of incredibly useful skills. That knowledge helps you implement stuff like autocomplete, linters, syntax highlighting, etc. The Super Tiny Compiler [0] is a very gentle introduction to the subject. It's great because it helps you quickly develop an initial mental model. To give an everyday usage…

If people find getting started on a compiler to be a bit too intimidating, one good way to get your feet wet is implementing an interpreter for small subset of a language. Perhaps the basic arithmetic part of adding/multiplying/dividing integers.

What do you use as an x86 code generator for such purposes ?

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#17

Post by stephen422 »

Anyone got stories about attempts to combine compiler construction with deep learning techniques? As AI related technologies now become realistically implementable, wouldn't the compiler theory be one of the most greatly affected research fields?

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#18

Post by sjrd »

shakna wrote: post #13
kornish wrote: post #2

Favorite quote: > There’s a wealth of tutorials, courses, books, and the like about how to write compilers. But if somebody believes that writing a transpiler isn’t fundamentally the same thing as writing a compiler, it may not occur to them to look at any of that material. The basic argument is this: "compiler" isn't a term that needs to be limited from transforming a high-level input to a low-level output. Any prog…

> But if somebody believes that writing a transpiler isn’t fundamentally the same thing as writing a compiler, I'd be surprised if anyone did. The use of transpiler is more about audience expectation, a specificity. It's shorter than writing "source-to-source compiler", and acknowledges compiler as its superset, right there in its name

That's unfortunately not my experience. I'm appalled every time someone tells me "But Scala.js is not a compiler, it's a transpiler, since it compiles to JS!"

I assume other language users and authors suffer the same kind of comments on a regular basis.

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#19

Post by sjrd »

userbinator wrote: post #3

I suppose if you look at it that way, then anyone who has completed Crenshaw's excellent tutorial series[1] could also claim to have written (approximately) the same number of "compilers". With a parser combinator library, you write a parser by starting with a bunch of primitive parsers (say, that parse numbers or characters) and combining them, eventually building up the ability to parse a sophisticated language. Th…

> From what I understand, the definition of a transpiler is one which almost exclusively performs syntax-syntax transforms, and doesn't delve into the semantics with e.g. dataflow or control flow.

I suggest you read the other article from the same author, linked at the beginning of this article: http://composition.al/blog/2017/07/30/what-do-people-mean-wh... . You will see that there is no such thing as "the definition of a transpiler".

Re: My first fifteen compilers

#20

Post by kqr »

eighthnate wrote: post #10
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

I'd strongly suggest diving into compilers if you've never studied the subject. Learning a bit on the subject unlocks a ton of incredibly useful skills. That knowledge helps you implement stuff like autocomplete, linters, syntax highlighting, etc. The Super Tiny Compiler [0] is a very gentle introduction to the subject. It's great because it helps you quickly develop an initial mental model. To give an everyday usage…

If people find getting started on a compiler to be a bit too intimidating, one good way to get your feet wet is implementing an interpreter for small subset of a language. Perhaps the basic arithmetic part of adding/multiplying/dividing integers.

I disagree. I tried that approach for many years but without external input, I could never figure out how to transition from a simple expression language to a proven, working compiler architecture. While large compiler architectures work well for smaller languages, the opposite is not true.

I have found it much better to pick a good introductory text and just work through the exercises.

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