How to think about compiling

https://uptointerpretation.com/posts/how-to-think-about-compiling/

by hardwaregeek • 4 years ago

40 13 4 years ago

uptointerpretation.com

jstanley• 4 years ago

how the heck do you take a nice, elegant language like Java

Ahh, it's a work of parody. :)

mrkeen• 4 years ago

I mean, how the heck do you take a nice, elegant language like Java and turn it into [..] assembly?

Here's the neat part: you don't!

salawat• 4 years ago

...follow the dependencies?

JVM is built on C syscalls.

mshockwave• 4 years ago

I feel like many people missed one important point before they complained about how hard it is to write a compiler: start simple! You don’t have to start with mature languages like Java even you really want just support a subset of it. Same for codegen targets: try some simpler (pseudo) architectures/bytecode before even thinking about the real ones like JVM bytecode or native assembly

0823498723498723• 4 years ago

If you look at many early compilers (BCPL, Mini Pascal, B, ... and come to think of it, arguably Python etc.) they massively simplified their lives by only doing codegen to very small VMs.

gumby3• 4 years ago

Not VM. ISA.

stevekemp• 4 years ago

I did just that, compiling reverse-polish mathematical operations, such as "1 3 / 9 *", into x86 assembly.

Even trivial compilers like that are fun to work on, as reminders of the low-level facilities available.

https://github.com/skx/math-compiler

hardwaregeek• 4 years ago

Agreed! Start with something really really simple like arithmetic. Part of the motivation for this blog post was that I struggled to get over the hump that came once I had done the basic stuff like arithmetic, variables, if/else, top level functions, and got to the harder bits like closures, garbage collection, etc.

How to think about compiling

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