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Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

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Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#101

Post by agency »

asibahi wrote: post #40
soegaard wrote: post #33

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction Abdulaziz Ghuloum http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf Abstract Compilers are perceived to be magical artifacts, carefully crafted by the wizards, and unfathomable by the mere mortals. Books on compilers are better described as wizard-talk: written by and for a clique of all-knowing practitioners. Real-life compilers are too complex to serve as an education…

Inspired by Ghuloum's book is this really nice book by Nora Sandler: Writing a C Compiler https://norasandler.com/book/

Another recent book inspired by Ghuloum is Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach (which publishes Python and Racket versions) https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse/Essentials-of-Compilatio...

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#102

Post by rangerelf »

projektfu wrote: post #62
jll29 wrote: post #22

*Donald Knute -> Donald Ervin Knuth is the author of the book "The Art of Computer Programming" (in progress for a couple of decades, currently volume 4c is being written). It is quite advanced, and it will likely not cover compilers anymore (Addison-Wesley had commissioned a compiler book from Knuth when he was a doctoral candidate, now he is retired and has stated his goal for the series has changed). I disagree wi…

The dragon book almost convinced me never to try to write a compiler. I don't know why people recommend it. I guess you're a lot smarter than I am. There are some excellent books out there. In its own way, the dragon book is excellent, but it is a terrible starting place. Here are a bunch of references from the same vintage as OP. I recommend starting with a book that actually walks through the process of building a…

You're not the only one. In college I took a compilers course and we used the dragon book, to me it sucked the joy out of the magical concept of making a compiler.

Some years later I (re-) discovered Forth, and I thought "why not?" and built my own forth in 32-bit Intel assembly, _that_ brought back the wonder and "magical" feeling of compilers again. All in less than 4KB.

I guess I wasn't the right audience for the dragon book.

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#104

Post by [deleted] »

LLMCodeAuditor wrote: post #95
lateforwork wrote: post #61

These days there's an even easier way to learn to write a compiler. Just ask Claude to write a simple compiler. Here's a simple C compiler (under 1500 lines) written by Claude: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/c-compiler It can compile and run C programs for sorting and searching. The code is very readable and very easy to understand.

I did not and will not run this on my computer but it looks like while loops are totally broken; note how poor the test coverage is. This is just my quick skimming of the code. Maybe it works perfectly and I am dumber than a computer. Regardless, it is incredibly reckless to ask Claude to generate assembly if you don't understand assembly, and it's irresponsible to recommend this as advice for newbies. They will not…

[deleted]

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#106

Post by randomNumber7 »

projektfu wrote: post #62
jll29 wrote: post #22

*Donald Knute -> Donald Ervin Knuth is the author of the book "The Art of Computer Programming" (in progress for a couple of decades, currently volume 4c is being written). It is quite advanced, and it will likely not cover compilers anymore (Addison-Wesley had commissioned a compiler book from Knuth when he was a doctoral candidate, now he is retired and has stated his goal for the series has changed). I disagree wi…

The dragon book almost convinced me never to try to write a compiler. I don't know why people recommend it. I guess you're a lot smarter than I am. There are some excellent books out there. In its own way, the dragon book is excellent, but it is a terrible starting place. Here are a bunch of references from the same vintage as OP. I recommend starting with a book that actually walks through the process of building a…

Imho the problem is the fixation on parser generators and BNF. It's just a lot easier to write a recursive descent parser than to figure out the correct BNF for anything other than a toy language with horrible syntax.

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#107

Post by georgehm »

I have fond memories of implementing an optimizing compiler for the CS241 compiler course offered back then by Prof Michael Franz who was a student of Niklaus Wirth, probably the most exhilarating course during my time at UC Irvine. This was in 2009 so my memory is vague but I recall he provided a virtual machine for a simple architecture called DLX and the compiler was to generate byte code for it.

Google search points me to https://github.com/cesarghali/PL241-Compiler/blob/master/DLX... for a description of the architecture and possibly https://bernsteinbear.com/assets/img/linear-scan-ra-context-... for the register allocation algorithm

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#108

Post by thefaux »

gf000 wrote: post #91
aldousd666 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing is the front end to a compiler. Can't get semantics without first recognizing syntax. I have a hard time thinking about programming languages without seeing them as a parsing exercise first, every time.

The recommended advice is to start with semantics first. Syntax will change, there is not much point fixing it down too early. Most of the work is actually the backend, and people sort of illusion themselves into "creating a language" just because they have an AST.

Syntax and semantics are never orthogonal and you always need syntax so it must be considered from the start. Any reasonable syntax will quickly become much more pleasant to generate an ast or ir than, say, manually building these objects in the host language of the compiler which is what the semantics first crowd seem to propose.

It also is only the case that most of the work is the backend for some compilers, though of course all of this depends on how backend is defined. Is backend just codegen or is it all of the analysis between parsing and codegen? If you target a high level language, which is very appropriate for one's first few compilers, the backend can be quite simple. At the simplest, no ast is even necessary and the compiler can just mechanically translate one syntax into another in a single pass.

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#109

Post by SilentM68 »

WalterBright wrote: post #100

What taught me how to write a compiler was the BYTE magazine 1978-08 .. 09 issues which had a listing for a Tiny Pascal compiler. Reading the listing was magical. What taught me how to write an optimizer was a Stanford summer course taught by Ullman and Hennessy. The code generator was my own concoction, and is apparently quite unlike any other one out there! I have the Dragon Book, but have never actually read it. S…

You can find some of those magazines linked below:

https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE

Re: Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

#110

Post by lateforwork »

LLMCodeAuditor wrote: post #95
lateforwork wrote: post #61

These days there's an even easier way to learn to write a compiler. Just ask Claude to write a simple compiler. Here's a simple C compiler (under 1500 lines) written by Claude: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/c-compiler It can compile and run C programs for sorting and searching. The code is very readable and very easy to understand.

I did not and will not run this on my computer but it looks like while loops are totally broken; note how poor the test coverage is. This is just my quick skimming of the code. Maybe it works perfectly and I am dumber than a computer. Regardless, it is incredibly reckless to ask Claude to generate assembly if you don't understand assembly, and it's irresponsible to recommend this as advice for newbies. They will not…

Are you concerned that the compiler might generate code that takes over your computer? If so the provided Dockerfile runs the generated code in a container.

Regarding test coverage, this is a toy compiler. Don't use it to compile production code! Regarding while loops and such, again, this is a simple compiler intended only to compile sort and search functions written in C.

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