Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers

http://prog21.dadgum.com/30.html

by luckystrike • 18 years ago

51 39 18 years ago

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DaniFong7• 18 years ago

Alternatively, you can learn macros, as PG might suggest. Fundamentally, compilers just translate one string of symbols into another. The ones we're familiar with just translate a high level language into assembly. But there are others -- every object relational model system has a defacto compiler.

aston2• 18 years ago

If you take a look at that nanopass paper, it's very much in the "just use macros" school of thought. It's even in Scheme.

For the tldr crowd, http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf.

hsmyers2• 18 years ago

Not a new idea-- Griswold wrote Snobol as a set of 360 macros.

DaniFong7• 18 years ago

That's an excellent paper, thank you.

One of the advantages of realizing that compilers are 'nothing special' is that you can start to use them all the time to simplify your work. It lets you think at a higher level.

mojuba5• 18 years ago

With that approach you won't be able to write a compiler for anything other than a (suboptimal) Lisp derivative, which itself is just a small part of computing world. Take a look at the GNU Compiler Collection and see how far it is to write a working optimizing compiler from the Lisp macro paradigm.

narag5• 18 years ago

And even if writing a more complete compiler wasn't difficult enough, there's more much to it. There are complex details like exception handling (stack unwinding, signals...), graphical debuggers, interface with GUI libraries, threads, etc.

The fact that only commercial (and expensive) Lisp implementations have all these features is a hint that they're not trivial.

DaniFong7• 18 years ago

I don't claim that this is the only way to learn how to write compilers, it's just one surprisingly effective way.

And I actually think skill in generalised, simple, macro-type compilers is more useful, generally, than knowing the ins and outs of optimizing compilers, but that's just me.

For the sake of discussion, what are some of the important things for optimizing compilers that you can't do with this approach? I'm having trouble finding any -- both in a literal sense of possibility, and from a practical standpoint.

hsmyers2• 18 years ago

So did he spell Knuth wrong as a typo or through ignorance? Or is this some subtle insult? Doesn't seem to thing Perl qualifies as useful either...Oh well, one less opinion to worry about.

gaius2• 18 years ago

It was a joke, a mistake that a newbie intimidated by huge textbooks might make.

Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers

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