Re:Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers
by catnaroek on Monday July 25, 2016 @01:53PM
(#12160314)
Not really. TAPL is a very useful book, but it won't teach you how to write a compiler, unless the only part of a compiler you actually care about is the type checker. The interpreters it describes (in the chapters titled βAn ML implementation of <whatever>β) are ridiculously inefficient.
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A good amount of new toy-ish languages compile to another language (typically javascript), and introduce new semantics and new type rules. As parent said, small DSLs.
You don't really need more than a typechecker and ast tranformations for that.
Re:Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers
by nickpsecurity on Monday July 25, 2016 @07:06PM
(#12162244)
You have a link to a good guide for beginners on designing and efficiently implementing type checkers?
This is a nice introductory tutorial on how to implement Hindley-Milner type inference: https://github.com/jozefg/hm
This is a more advanced tutorial that illustrates a nice but tricky optimization that OCaml's type checker internally uses: http://okmij.org/ftp/ML/generalization.html
Finally, TAPL's type checkers are pretty good. They aren't designed for efficiency, though. They're designed to closely follow the book's contents: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/checkers/
Re:Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers
by nickpsecurity on Monday July 25, 2016 @08:01PM
(#12162440)
Thanks for the links!