If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it backwards

Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by waynecochran on Thursday August 07, 2014 @11:47AM (#8148315)

I've taught a compiler design course every other year for awhile and one of the big drawbacks is that the students don't have an intimate knowledge of machine/assembly language for any specific architecture. 20 years ago programmers understood how the underlying machine and OS worked in detail -- nowadays programmers/students are strongly insulated from these details.

Ideally I would want to teach a two semester course starting with the backend first -- the first task would be to write several significant programs in assembly language (for some clean RISC machine) and grade them on how well they managed register allocation, stack frame / heap management, page alignment, etc.. Then cover how to convert some SSA IR (e.g., LLVM) into that language.

How do you translate into a language you don't understand?

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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by rayiner on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:20PM (#8148530)

At least at GT 10 years ago, a machine architecture course (starting with logic gates, moving on to MIPS assembly, then CPU architecture) was pretty early in the CS curriculum. Seems pretty essential, is it not common?

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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by nesyt on Thursday August 07, 2014 @12:37PM (#8148650)

At Utah (graduated three months ago) we were required to take one class that used MIPS and another class that used x86 (the compilers class was optional). They were great, and I agree seem pretty essential.

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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by Psyonic on Thursday August 07, 2014 @03:01PM (#8149470)

Good to see other Utes on here :)

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Re:If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it ... by warfangle on Thursday August 07, 2014 @11:53AM (#8148356)

What better way to teach someone assembly, etc, than to teach them how to convert code that they understand to code that the architecture can understand?

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