Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers | Hacker News Reader

Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers

c9x.me

100 pointsandrewchambers17 comments

Also worth studying some actual tiny compilers, just to get an idea that not all compilers have to be extremely complex:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9125912

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8576068

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822

http://bellard.org/otcc/

Tiny does not mean "simple", and this is very true in compilers. There are ways of making a compiler trivial and extremely comprehensible, but it involves somewhat lengthy code. A tiny compiler which fuses multiple transforms into one may be much harder to comprehend than a larger compiler made of a long sequence of much simpler passes.

So your suggestion may be quite intimidating to the beginners. I'd rather recommend to start with the Racket-style language extensions and DSLs first.

http://t3x.org/subc/ is tiny and simple. But I'm supposed to say that!

If you ported one of your excellent compiler books to Rust, I would buy it again, twice.

Nils Holm, master compiler educator http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?contributorId=740596

It is nice and simple indeed but does not really show anything instructive in terms of backend, which is the focus of this thread.

And once you go into SSA and proper isel, there is no way to do it both easily and compactly at the same time, passes must be split for simplicity or fused into a mess for a compactness.

Of course, I am only talking about a number of lines of code, besides this you can keep your compiler totally trivial for any degree of optimisations complexity.

It does show you how to approach building a back-end in the first place, which I would consider to be quite instructive for someone who has never done it before. And it does separate the phases and still remains compact.

Of course, once you have progressed to things like SSA, you might want to study something more complex.

BTW, the current version of SubC has a much more interesting back-end and even uses AST-level optimization.

An old tutorial: http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/

If you want to think about memory models, then I recently wrote an introduction: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/memory_models.html

A good start. But a lot of really important and approachable stuff is missing from the list.

On SSA, for example, the best introduction is S. Pop thesis: http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/people/pop/papers/2006-12-thesis.pdf

Please post as many good resources as you can, i'm sure they can be added.

Far from a comprehensive list, just the stuff I could remember straight away:

Nanopass: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf http://andykeep.com/pubs/np-preprint.pdf

An extremely useful technique, somewhat related to what Sebastian Pop was doing with Prolog in his thesis: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mcarbin/papers/aplas05.pdf

also http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/courses/654/tools/bierhoff-bd...

All such things may be inappropriate for the top notch commercial compilers due to a limited performance, but are great for DSLs and for an amateur work, because they're so much easier than an ad hoc hand-coded approach.

On LLVM specifically, can be used as a nice introduction into how backend works: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/11/24/life-of-an-instructi...

I've got a small collection of links on compilers:

https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/com...

Also worth looking int pl/0 and the p-code machine.

Edit: Also, Thomas W Christopher used to have some pdfs on the tools of computing web page that dealt with compilers. Had an interesting one about using matrices to computer first and follow sets. I wish I could find those again.

Does anyone know of a good starting point for someone who wants to build a language targeting the JVM? (The JVM spec isn't an easy read)

Try ASM:

http://asm.ow2.org/

It is lightweight, well-documented and easy to use. It has an IntelliJ plugin that wills how you the sequence of API calls you'd need to make to create a given compiled Java class.

I still recommend reading the spec. You'll need to understand the JVM execution model and the meaning of the byte codes to successfully target it.

The truffle tutorial is the easiest way to get started. Will give you very good performance.

That's a great list, all in one place! Thanks to the author of that web page.

check out some of the other pages under http://c9x.me/. He has some cool tutorials and other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com