Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

nostarch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 159 posts

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#21

Post by spinningslate »

Coolbeanstoo wrote: post #5

This looks cool, been interested in learning more about compilers since I did the basics in college. Lots of things seem to focus on making interpreters and never make it to the code generation part so its nice to see that this features information about that.

With no disrespect to the book that's the subject of this thread as I haven't read it, but Bob Nystrom's Crafting Interpreter [0] is a fantastic book. It covers all phases in compilation, including both an interpreter and a VM.

It's been covered on several threads here over the years [1].

[0]: https://craftinginterpreters.com/ [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=crafting+interpreters

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#22

Post by alok-g »

I would love to see a book that talks about going all the way to generate machine code, i.e., not stopping at generation of assembly.

Alternatively, I would like to learn about not just how to make a compiler, but also simultaneously a debugger, hot-reloading, etc.

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#23

Post by Croftengea »

mjburgess wrote: post #16
hasbot wrote: post #14

So what's different about writing a compiler in 2024 than say 10, 20, or 30 years ago? When I started writing compilers in the 80's and 90's lex/flex and yacc/bison were popular. ANTLR came out but I never had a chance to use it. Everything after lexing and parsing was always hand rolled.

Parser-generators were always academic projects that had little relevance to making real-world programming languages -- where parsing is very easy to write, and necessarily benefits from doing it (ie., you can get better error handling/etc.). Today most languages are front-ends for LLVM IR, but LLVM is very slow and takes a long time to optimize. Many new languages target x86/arm directly with their own weakly optimi…

> Parser-generators were always academic projects

Were they? GCC abandoned bison in favour of their own parser relatively recently.

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#24

Post by kragen »

badsectoracula wrote: post #15

Weird that this is about building a C compiler[0] in OCaml . I expected the implementation language to also be C both for consistency but also because i'm willing to bet that there are more people who can read C than OCaml. [0] actually from the readme in the github repo[1] it seems to be a C subset, not all of C [1] https://github.com/nlsandler/nqcc2

ocaml makes writing a compiler enormously more accessible, and learning to read ocaml, while it can be somewhat intimidating at first, is much easier than learning to write a compiler

(imagine a medieval accountant trying to learn to do long division in roman numerals. he'll be much better off learning the western arabic numerals fibonacci is so excited about)

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#25

Post by signaru »

Have read the first few chapters and it expects that you either read the accompanying source code or implement your own and pass the tests. The pseudo code presented in the book often look like function calls with the inner details not there in the book. Furthermore, as already pointed out in another comment, the available implementation is in OCaml, which is probably not something many C programmers have experience with.

Nevertheless, I think I'm learning more from this book than most other books I've tried before that are far more theoretical or abstract. I'm still eager to reach the chapter on implementing C types. I think it's a good book, but it requires more effort than something like Crafting Interpreters or Writing a Compiler/Interpreter in Go, while also covering topics not in those books.

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#26

Post by rramadass »

i_don_t_know wrote: post #7

Somewhat unrelated: Is there a book that walks you through building a database system from storage to queries, optimizer, execution, indexing, transactions, etc?

In the early 90's Al Stevens wrote 2 books C Database Development and C++ Database Development with source code which might be a good starting point.

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#27

Post by kragen »

mjburgess wrote: post #16
hasbot wrote: post #14

So what's different about writing a compiler in 2024 than say 10, 20, or 30 years ago? When I started writing compilers in the 80's and 90's lex/flex and yacc/bison were popular. ANTLR came out but I never had a chance to use it. Everything after lexing and parsing was always hand rolled.

Parser-generators were always academic projects that had little relevance to making real-world programming languages -- where parsing is very easy to write, and necessarily benefits from doing it (ie., you can get better error handling/etc.). Today most languages are front-ends for LLVM IR, but LLVM is very slow and takes a long time to optimize. Many new languages target x86/arm directly with their own weakly optimi…

yacc/bison was used for lex, bc, pcc, gcc, original awk, the bsd pascal compiler, eqn, m4 (!), and many other languages. it's still used for pcc, oawk, mawk, pari/gp, and units. that's just what i have sitting around in my downloads directory

and, while we're talking about ocaml, ocaml does use ocamllex and ocamlyacc for its own parser

so, while you can certainly do without parser generators, they have very commonly been used for making real-world programming languages. almost every programming language anyone here has ever heard of was first implemented with a parser generator. the main exceptions are probably fortran, cobol, algol, lisps, c, and pascal

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#28

Post by kragen »

i_don_t_know wrote: post #7

Somewhat unrelated: Is there a book that walks you through building a database system from storage to queries, optimizer, execution, indexing, transactions, etc?

transaction processing by gray (rip) and reuter was pretty close back in the 90s. i don't think it covered query optimization because it's really about tp monitors rather than databases, but, perhaps surprisingly, it does cover the other topics you're asking about

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#29

Post by auselen »

thechao wrote: post #19
mjburgess wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parser-generators were always academic projects that had little relevance to making real-world programming languages -- where parsing is very easy to write, and necessarily benefits from doing it (ie., you can get better error handling/etc.). Today most languages are front-ends for LLVM IR, but LLVM is very slow and takes a long time to optimize. Many new languages target x86/arm directly with their own weakly optimi…

When your computer was anemic, and could barely do the tasks required for it, eking out a few percent — or a 2x! — from an optimizer was important. Now-a-days, the difference between "big compiler optimized" and "little compiler not optimized" can be quite dramatic; but, is probably no more than 4x — certainly within range of the distinction between "systems programming language" and "high tuned JITted scripting lang…

Wouldn’t just a simple case of bad code generation render little compiler into a toy one?

Repeating others, today’s compilers are really just “optimizing compilers”, there is no room for toying in production environments.

Re: Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

#30

Post by hdbxbxndj »

Croftengea wrote: post #20
badsectoracula wrote: post #15

Weird that this is about building a C compiler[0] in OCaml . I expected the implementation language to also be C both for consistency but also because i'm willing to bet that there are more people who can read C than OCaml. [0] actually from the readme in the github repo[1] it seems to be a C subset, not all of C [1] https://github.com/nlsandler/nqcc2

OCaml? Thanks for saving me a click!

OCaml is one of the most used languages for compiler design

A good engineer should be able to use the right tool for the job

Post reply on HN