21–30 of 173 posts
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Some of us enjoy intellectual challenges.... The Bornat book looks great. The fact that it is in BCPL is ultra cool.
If you're still playing with Rubik's cubes you're going to get left behind.
I disagree with the author's point: the "Dragon book"'s ("Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Aho et al.) Chapter 2 is a self-sufficient introduction into compilers from end to end, and it can be read on its own, ignoring the rest of the excellent book.
Another fantastic intro to compiler writing is the short little book "Compilers" by Niklaus Wirth, which explains and contains the surprisingly short source code of a complete compiler (the whole book is highly understandable - pristine clarity, really) and all in (I learned enough from these two sources to write a compiler in high school.)
I think that the nanopass architecture is especially well suited for compilers implemented by LLMs as they're excellent at performing small and well defined pieces of work. I'd love to see Anthropic try their C compiler experiment again but with a Nanopass framework to build on.
I've recently been looking in to adding Nanopass support to Langkit, which would allow for writing a Nanopass compiler in Ada, Java, Python, or a few other languages [3].
[1]: https://andykeep.com/pubs/dissertation.pdf
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In fact, inventing new programming languages and writing compilers for them used to be so much of a trend that people created YACC (Yet Another Compiler Compiler) to make it easier.
Nowadays I’ve heard recommended Crafting Interpreters. ( https://craftinginterpreters.com ) The Nanopass paper link doesn’t work.
Nowadays I’ve heard recommended Crafting Interpreters. ( https://craftinginterpreters.com ) The Nanopass paper link doesn’t work.
I wonder if it makes sense to do the nand2tetris course for an absolute beginner since it too has compiler creation in it.
I have ignored all the stuff about parsing theory, parser generators, custom DSL's, formal grammers etc. and instead have just been using the wonderful Megaparsec parser combinator library. I can easily follow the parsing logic, it's unambiguous (only one successful parse is possible, even if it might not be what you intended), it's easy to compose and re-use parser functions (was particularly helpful for whitespace sensitive parsing/line-fold handling), and it removes the tedious lexer/parser split you get with traditional parsing approaches.