Re:Writing Your Own Toy Compiler Using Flex, Bison and LLVM
by mahmud on Saturday September 19, 2009 @12:12PM
(#832079)
I wrote a long reply then decided against it. I will ignore that "C is on all machines" fallacy, because it's not. People are accustomed to downloading viewers and codecs for even the most basic documents and multimedia files; witness the trouble people go through just to make an audio widget play on their MySpace page, or an MS Office version X template in version X++. Compiler users should be bloody well sophisticated and have no trouble installing the necessary runtimes; it couldn't be harder than installing Flash, Java or .NET, really.
Forget the word "compilers" for a second. Pick the most powerful language you can find for experimenting with graph algorithms.
That's it. That's all it boils down to. Compiler bloat, running speed, start up time and other stuff is just a programmer's wishful thinking. How many machines in the world run your software? how much of your user's time have you wasted by not implementing a piece of software as efficiently as you could? (would your users trade delivery time for startup or running time? i.e. do they want to start using your program today, even if it runs 300% slower than the machine allows, or do they want to use it next week and expect it to run at maximum speed? :-)
Forget the word "compilers" for a second. Pick the most powerful language you can find for experimenting with graph algorithms.
That's it. That's all it boils down to. Compiler bloat, running speed, start up time and other stuff is just a programmer's wishful thinking. How many machines in the world run your software? how much of your user's time have you wasted by not implementing a piece of software as efficiently as you could? (would your users trade delivery time for startup or running time? i.e. do they want to start using your program today, even if it runs 300% slower than the machine allows, or do they want to use it next week and expect it to run at maximum speed? :-)