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

CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

cs.cornell.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 63 posts

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#31

Post by Jtsummers »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #24

Is there also a self guided course for "basic compilers", before stepping into an advanced level?

I'm a fan of the structure used in Essentials of Compilation [1][2] and Writing a C Compiler [3]. If you want to start with interpreters, I like Essentials of Programming Languages [4]. I have to admit, as popular as Crafting Interpreters is on this site and others, I'm not a fan. Others seem to love it so it's worth a shot, and freely available.

EOC and EOPL are a bit on the academic side, but, I think, they're highly approachable aside from the issues some people have with Scheme and Racket (the Python version of EOC would address that issue). Afterwards, I think the other, deeper and more academic texts on compilers become more approachable.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047760/essentials-of-compila... - Racket version, has an open access version

[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048248/essentials-of-compila... - Python version, has an open access version

[3] https://nostarch.com/writing-c-compiler - Your choice of implementation language

[4] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262062794/essentials-of-program... - Scheme, but works in Racket

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#32

Post by WJW »

runevault wrote: post #25
awesomeMilou wrote: post #24

Is there also a self guided course for "basic compilers", before stepping into an advanced level?

I'd say check out Crafting Interpreters [1]. It has 2 parts, the first in Java for doing a treewalk Interpreter in Java before going farther with a version written in C. 1. https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Not GP, but after doing Crafting Interpreters I was kinda left with a gap in my knowledge regarding the conversion of an AST into native code. Also kinda missing was optimization passes over an AST. I somewhat understand the idea, but it would definitely be nice to have a more guided book/article for this.

Crafting Interpreters is definitely a recommended read, but it stops at Interpreters (fair enough, the book is thick enough). Crafting Compilers would need at least 4-5 extra chapters IMO.

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#34

Post by mlazos »

titzer wrote: post #2

The section on dynamic compilers is more or less all about trace compilation. Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly. The more important concepts here are type feedback and speculation and deoptimization, as well as making fast compilers and tiering. The course overall looks good, and it's great that so much is available online, so well done, Adrian.

I work on PyTorch torch.compile and it’s a tracing compiler as well. Perhaps this domain is very narrow though; it is also a very not conventional compiler, you’d probably be deeply offended by some of the stuff we do! ;)

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#36

Post by tomhow »

Previously...

CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39577878 - March 2024 (102 comments)

Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35130975 - March 2023 (82 comments)

Advanced Compilers: Self-Guided Online Course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25386756 - Dec 2020 (232 comments)

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#37

Post by Jtsummers »

xqb64 wrote: post #35

How does this compare to Nora Sandler's "Writing a C compiler" in terms of the potential gains for the reader?

Her book sits closer to what you'd get from an undergraduate level compilers course, this course covers more advanced material than she does. If you're a novice or a dabbler, start with her book or something else at that level, then try out this course and fill in the gaps as needed.

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#38

Post by mrkeen »

ebiederm wrote: post #26
jcranmer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, course numbers are regular enough that you can look up what the "intro compilers" course is: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4120/2026sp/?schedule The short answer is that compilers is basically broken up into two courses, with the first course largely being the minimum necessary to build a compiler (lexing, parsing, codegen, register allocation), and the second course being how to build an optimizing comp…

The academic literature on register allocation is scary. First is presented a linear time optimal algorithm for graph coloring then it is claimed better can be done by a O(N^2) algorithm that uses a heuristic. I do believe the dragon book got caught with the emperor's new register allocator and the literature hasn't really recovered yet.

I didn't believe the optimal algorithm is linear time, so I checked the source:

  a simple register allocation algorithm can achieve most ot the performance of the more complex algorithms: linear-scan register allocation, developed by Poletto and Sarkar
"Most of the performance" is not optimal. Were you referring to a different source?

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#39

Post by mikemike »

titzer wrote: post #2

The section on dynamic compilers is more or less all about trace compilation. Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly. The more important concepts here are type feedback and speculation and deoptimization, as well as making fast compilers and tiering. The course overall looks good, and it's great that so much is available online, so well done, Adrian.

Trace compilation is NOT a dead end.

LuaJIT works just fine. On big programs. On hundreds of millions of servers and devices.

I find it deeply saddening that even scholars keep repeating this trope. Ignorance is bliss.

Re: CS 6120: Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course (2020)

#40

Post by titzer »

mikemike wrote: post #39
titzer wrote: post #2

The section on dynamic compilers is more or less all about trace compilation. Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly. The more important concepts here are type feedback and speculation and deoptimization, as well as making fast compilers and tiering. The course overall looks good, and it's great that so much is available online, so well done, Adrian.

Trace compilation is NOT a dead end. LuaJIT works just fine. On big programs. On hundreds of millions of servers and devices. I find it deeply saddening that even scholars keep repeating this trope. Ignorance is bliss.

Hi Mike, I think your work on luajit is really cool. I worked on JavaScript for some time and among all of the JS engines out there, a lot of ideas were tried. TraceMonkey in particular did explore trace compilation for JavaScript and benefited from a lot of fundamental research into trace compilation from Michael Franz's group and others. I've talked to many of those people. It just didn't work out for JS as there are too many diverse programs out there that aren't well-behaved. It's not enough to get great performance on some programs (and hopefully good performance on average programs) if there are pathological cases that ruin user experience. The internet is the greatest VM fuzzer yet invented and produces some stunningly awful things that present constant challenges to speculative dynamic optimization. It's well accepted in the JS space that method JITs have more stable, understandable performance, though they too can get into trouble.

Best of luck.

Post reply on HN