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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)

#131

Post by elzbardico »

commandlinefan wrote: post #71
stupefy wrote: post #52

One nice piece of advice that I received is that books are like RAMs, you do not have to go through them sequentially, but can do random access to the parts of it you need. With this in mind I find it doable to get one the thick books and only read the part that I need for my task. But, to also be fair, the above random access method does not work when you don't know what you don't know. So I understand why having a…

I've seen people suggest that throughout the years, but it's never worked out for me. To get anything meaningful out of a printed book, I've had to read them cover to cover. There used to be worthwhile reference books, but those have moved on to the internet.

I like doing both. Skimming through the interesting parts first, them re-reading from start sequentially.

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

#133

Post by pjmlp »

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…

It was a product of its time I guess, much better ones from similar vintage,

The Tiger book (with C, Standard ML, and Java variants)

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/

Compiler Design in C (freely available nowadays, beware this is between K&R C and C89)

https://holub.com/compiler/

lcc, A Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C

https://drh.github.io/lcc/

Or if one wants to go with more clever stuff,

Compiling with Continuations

Lisp in Small Pieces

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

#134

Post by hmry »

markus_zhang wrote: post #119
hmry wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a few years since I worked with the dragon book, but I think the most common complaint was that it starts with like 350 pages on parser theory: generating bottom-up and top-down parsers from context free grammars, optimizing lexers for systems that don't have enough RAM to store an entire source file, etc... before ever getting to what most people who want to write a compiler care about (implementing type i…

I actually think the parsing part is more important for laymen. Like, there may be a total of 10K programmers who are interested in learning compiler theories, but maybe 100 of them are ever going to write the backend -- the rest of them are stuck with either toy languages, or use parsing to help with their job. Parsing is definitely more useful for most of us who are not smart enough :D

Yeah I agree, that seems vey true. Although the average person probably also benefits more from learning about recursive descent and pratt parsing than LL(k) parser generators, automata, and finding first and follow sets :)

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

#135

Post by drob518 »

pjmlp wrote: post #133
projektfu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was a product of its time I guess, much better ones from similar vintage, The Tiger book (with C, Standard ML, and Java variants) https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ Compiler Design in C (freely available nowadays, beware this is between K&R C and C89) https://holub.com/compiler/ lcc, A Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C https://drh.github.io/lcc/ Or if one wants to go with more clever stuff, Compiling with…

Another vote for Lisp in Small Pieces. Great high level compiler book that teaches you how to build a Lisp and doesn’t get bogged down in lexing and parsing.

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

kuboble wrote: post #89
jgwil2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link by by chance? A quick search didn't turn anything up.

No, I am checking my emails (it was in 2012), and all the links are broken. however I could dig out the references to it. Apparently it was a course by Prof. Alex Aiken and karpathy was a TA. This repository seems to be a future version of the same course. https://github.com/gboduljak/stanford-compilers-coursework Edit: found the videos from the course on the archive https://archive.org/details/academictorrents_e31e5…

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by dang »

kuharich wrote: post #97

Past comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927784 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10786842

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Want to Write a Compiler? Read These Two Papers (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10786842 - Dec 2015 (70 comments)

Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927784 - Aug 2011 (77 comments)

Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231758 - June 2008 (39 comments)

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

#138

Post by andoando »

stupefy wrote: post #52

One nice piece of advice that I received is that books are like RAMs, you do not have to go through them sequentially, but can do random access to the parts of it you need. With this in mind I find it doable to get one the thick books and only read the part that I need for my task. But, to also be fair, the above random access method does not work when you don't know what you don't know. So I understand why having a…

Most books have so much nonsense details that I cant help but skip most of it.

On the other hand technical books can be so overwhelmingly difficult that you need to go outside and do hours of learning to understand one tidbit of it

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

#139

Post by ux266478 »

orthoxerox wrote: post #78
ux266478 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> types and typing This would be like asking for a book on designing grammar. It's just too disjoint of a field to have any kind of reasonable baseline, and it's drop dead easy to grok a basic one together. With those two things being equal, just like with grammar, the answer to this is any resource about implementing the language you're trying to ape.

It's drop dead easy to grok a basic one together until you get to hairy stuff like overloading, lambdas and generics. The reasonable baseline would be something like Java 1. Scalars, arrays and classes. If I remember correctly, Lox even skips arrays as an exercise for the user.

The problem is in the case of overloading or lambdas being "hairy", it follows you're well outside the scope of a beginner. Generics are explicitly outside the scope of a beginner learning to implement a basic type system.

In the case you're not a beginner, it's not true that no literature exists on type systems and their implementation. The mountain of literature is essentially inexhaustible, but if you're still wondering about how to implement any type system at all, if you've never done it before, you really need to not worry so much about that. Kind of like how you don't even think about implementing a tracing jitter before you've written the world's shittiest tree-walking interpreter.

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

#140

Post by kristianp »

voidUpdate wrote: post #45

I've been having a look at the Crenshaw series, and it seems pretty good, but one thing that kinda annoys me is the baked-in line wrapping. Is there a way to unwrap the text so its not all in a small area on the left of my screen?

Here's an archived version converted to x86: https://web.archive.org/web/20220603004249/http://www.pp4s.c...
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