Planning to read this soon. Anyone got any other compiler book recommendations? Preferably modern (I've heard the dragon book is out of date)
AFAIK the problem with the dragon book is the same as with most academic compiler courses. It spends most of its time on the theory-heavy front-end (parsing) and much less on the back-end (code generation). Real-world compilers are very much the opposite.
Also I did some searching to see past discussions of Engineering a Compiler and found this interesting comment thread from Bob Nystrom for anyone interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725581
Then, in the future, when I find myself needing some concept from the book, I usually remember at least that it is in the book. Then I go back and read that part more carefully. Now that it's relevant to a real problem I have, I tend to remember it much better after the second read through.
Recent, that is the Racket version and the author has a Python version, too. Based on the nanopass compiler idea. It builds out the compilers over the course of the books.
The dragon book was my textbook in college, brings back memories, might be outdated but some concepts should still be useful.
A lot of other "code yourself" books, on the other hand, simply slice already finished codebases, and there's no way to test a simpler incomplete version of the program unless the reader makes extra effort and go beyond what is presented in the book.
While there is a lot of overlapping topics in Nystrom's and Ball's books, there are also enough differences to learn something new from the other. Ball's books uses the same parser and AST as front ends to both tree-walking and VM interpreter. CI, on the other hand, skips the AST for the VM interpreter, and also teaches extra topics like implementing garbage collection, dictionaries/hashtables and class-based OOP.