Tell HN: The dragon compiler book (2nd edition) is a great book

Hello,

I have seen a lot of people on the internet say that the dragon book is horrible book to learn compilers from.

well, I have read some of the second edition of the dragon book and I think it is a great book. The main criticism is that its too focused on parsing. Thats just like 5 chapters. I skipped these and went straight into the intermediate language, code generation, and optimizing chapters.

These chapters give a detailed account of things such as register allocation, instruction selection, and instruction scheduling. The optimizing chapters are also good.

im not claiming im an expert compiler person. I am not but compilers is something i want to learn and so i gave the dragon book a try and i really liked it.

more importantly the dragon book made me realize that compilers are mathematical systems in a way. the ast is tree and trees have mathematical properties but graphs are needed for register allocation, dataflow analysis for optimization. optimization is math problem.

So i think this book gave me a better understanding of the field and it made appreciate compilers.

i'd say if youre interested in compilers you can start with "essence of compilation" by dr. siek and get some experience writing compilers and then read the dragon book.

i just wanted to share my experience. i think the dragon book is a great book.

I think the third edition of Engineering a Compiler was recently published (paperback only, WTH). I found that to be a better read IMO.

Hi, my name is Weston, and I'm bad at parsing (and it hurts the whole time I do it because I'm just barely clever enough to do it badly/dangerously).

What else should I study besides the first 5 chapters of the 2nd edition of the dragon book?

I'm having flashbacks to a well funded startup I used to work at. People seemed to think that to how to handle having commas in data while still being able to use CSV files was an area of active research. At, like, a dozen different layers in the application we would strip commas from any and all strings, but they would still frequently slip through and screw up the entire pipeline. The complaints I made about this quickly used up what little political capital I had. The joys of `str.split ','` based CSV "parsing".

For those that find it a bit light, I enjoyed Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Steven S. Muchnick. Which covers topics that I found much trickier.