The Art of Computer Programming itself is a yak shave. Knuth was originally going to write a book on compilers, but he realized that he needed to cover some prerequisites first, and that became TAOCP.
Iirc that should be part of the taocp plan.
Syntactic Algorithms, in preparation.
9. Lexical scanning (includes also string search and data compression)
10. Parsing techniques
...
And after Volumes 1--5 are done, God willing, I plan to publish Volume 6 (the theory of context-free languages) and Volume 7 (Compiler techniques), but only if the things I want to say about those topics are still relevant and still haven't been said."
Given what he did for computer algorithms (and doc type setting) this makes me really curious about his views on compilers.