TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end

Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by RossBencina on Thursday February 20, 2025 @08:21PM (#43122943)

I never took a compilers course. The first reading recommendation I got was The Dragon Book. Perhaps not the worst starting place at the time (mid 90s) but my memory of it was that the book was front-loaded with automata and parser theory. At the time I didn't really make it past the front end. It would be interesting to see a compiler tutorial that started at codegen and worked backwards (or started at the ends: lexing and codegen, and worked towards the middle in alternating chapters).

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by sieve on Thursday February 20, 2025 @08:33PM (#43123041)

The Dragon Book is terrible as an introduction. There are better books I would probably recommend, but not to a beginner. The best "complete" intro out there today is Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters.[1]

[1] https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by RossBencina on Thursday February 20, 2025 @09:35PM (#43123366)

> There are better books I would probably recommend

I'm curious what you'd recommend.

For what it's worth my goal was to compile to machine code. Anything less would have seemed insufficient. Later I got Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java" and Allen and Kennedy "Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures".

Cooper and Torczon "Engineering a Compiler" was recommended here recently. I haven't seen it.

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by sieve on Thursday February 20, 2025 @09:54PM (#43123469)

I got started from the books that were available here in the early 2000s. The one I like the most is "Programming Language Pragmatics" by Michael Scott, mainly for its simplicity. Then there is "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" by Steven Muchnick. I have Allen-Kennedy's book too, but I think it went over my head when I went through it. So I kept it aside.

"Engineering a Compiler" is quite approachable.

But, once you know the basics, you get the best bang-for-the-buck by looking at source code of various compilers and virtual machines.

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by sitkack on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:25AM (#43124981)

There is a whole body of non-academic work aimed at practioners for implementing compilers.

Nils Holm's work https://t3x.org/

Teaching and Learning Compilers Incrementally - Jeremy Siek - RacketCon 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43VA_QaTRT8

Nanopass https://nanopass.org/

original paper that was the basis for nanopass http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/gnzra...

The Crafting Interpreters and the Thorsten Ball books

https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html

https://interpreterbook.com/ https://compilerbook.com/

https://www.phind.com/search/cm7efcpv000002e6hqdbfojex

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by ratmice on Friday February 21, 2025 @01:53PM (#43131400)

I don't think that the ghuloum 2006 paper was the initial basis for nanopass, at least the paper A Nanopass Framework for Compiler Education∗ seems to predate it in 2004 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1016848.1016878

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Re:TinyCompiler: A compiler in a week-end by delta_p_delta_x on Friday February 21, 2025 @04:59AM (#43125827)

> It would be interesting to see a compiler tutorial that started at codegen and worked backwards (or started at the ends: lexing and codegen, and worked towards the middle in alternating chapters)

This is exactly how my university's compiler course did it[1]. It was really nice to start with assembly and go upwards. We had all the lexing/parsing stuff being discussed around the middle of the semester rather than being saddled with theory-heavy regex, automata theory, etc right at the beginning.

[1]: https://ilyasergey.net/CS4212/

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