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Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

I'd say check out Crafting Interpreters [1]. It has 2 parts, the first in Java for doing a treewalk Interpreter in Java before going farther with a version written in C.

1. https://craftinginterpreters.com/

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Not GP, but after doing Crafting Interpreters I was kinda left with a gap in my knowledge regarding the conversion of an AST into native code. Also kinda missing was optimization passes over an AST. I somewhat understand the idea, but it would definitely be nice to have a more guided book/article for this.

Crafting Interpreters is definitely a recommended read, but it stops at Interpreters (fair enough, the book is thick enough). Crafting Compilers would need at least 4-5 extra chapters IMO.

Most of the work involved in emitting code deals with somewhat arbitrary hardware details. Pretty much the only way is to get familiar with your target hardware features, instructions, and platform ABIs. ISA manuals all have sections describing these, they're pretty much always very dry and "linguistically rigorous" so it's not easy to read but everything you need is there. Actually emitting instructions is pretty boring and mechanical outside of some considerations and subtleties with hardware-specific optimization, OS calling conventions, register selection, etc.

Hmm I would have hoped for something more formal and that's focused on compiled runtimes, instead of dynamic runtimes

Still, I appreciate you replying, I'm sure you meant to be helpful!

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