A Compiler Writing Journey

(2020)

Previously:

12 comments; 156 points. 2022 November 29. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33788013>

67 comments; 484 points. 2020 January 8. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21968420>

"Part 64: Self-compilation on an 8-bit CPU"

Unlike how a bunch of projects end right as they start to get good, this has a great ending. Thank you

Worth also mentioning Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom (craftinginterpreters.com) as a companion — it implements two interpreters in Java then C, covering a treewalk interpreter and a bytecode VM, and is freely available online. Together with this journey and nils-m-holm's Practical Compiler Construction mentioned above, you get a remarkably complete self-study path from parsing fundamentals all the way to code generation.

On the C vs typed language debate: C forces you to think about representation explicitly — no algebraic types to lean on, every tagged union is manual. That arguably teaches you more about what a compiler actually does structurally. But OCaml or Haskell's pattern matching makes the recursive descent so natural that it's worth attempting both if you have the time. They illuminate different things.

This hopefully can be useful as well https://space4links.com/r/writing-a-compiler

Very cool! I can’t imagine writing everything in C, I’m currently learning this in OCaml which seems nicer for a project like this.

Having it all in C brings back memories from "Compiler Design in C" a famous book for its time, printed in 1990.

https://holub.com/compiler/

I feel like interpreters and compilers were trendy in 2015/2016, bu i'm too young to know. Am i right?

[dead]

How much of Claude was used?