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Comment by oxff | Hacker News Reader

Writing a toy compiler, the entire pipeline end-to-end, for a language no matter how small. I can't think of another exercise that covers so many good issues to solve, and good practices for solving them.

The two I like to recommend are:

- PLAI: https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/

- Essentials of Compilation: https://wphomes.soic.indiana.edu/jsiek/

For general software design, this blog is quite golden: https://www.tedinski.com/archive/

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Crafting Interpreters [1] is also really good, it's often recommended on here when compilers are mentioned. It does spoon-feed you the code (Java in the first part, C in the second), but it's descriptive enough to follow along in a different language/paradigm if that's what you'd rather do.

[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

A game engine will also get you there, even for a small 2D game that loads sprites.

PLAI seems to be a upper level course. What kind of programming/CS background did you have before that? Did PLAI need knowing the language it uses beforehand?

> PLAI seems to be a upper level course

I am a big believer in "Google what you don't know"; it was mostly self-contained from what I recall.

> What kind of programming/CS background did you have before that

I am self-taught, I had like couple of months of JS web-dev under me.

> Did PLAI need knowing the language it uses beforehand

No. That book and the author tries to teach in language agnostic / programming generalist type of way. His other book is good too, aimed for absolute beginners: https://dcic-world.org/2022-01-25/index.html

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