For the record, I think it's a terrible idea to keep prototyping compilers in C in this day and age. There is already a DSL for compiler construction and it's called Standard ML. SML/NJ, along with the New Jersey Machine Toolkit, Ramsey and Fernandez' excellent binary-frobbing-utility framework (yes! tools that generate profilers, debuggers, tracers, assemblers and disassemblers!) along with stuff from the SUIF project, you can start writing very sophisticated industrial compilers in fraction of the time it takes to debug just the front-end stuff in C. Even Perl, or your scripting language of choice, is better than C for compiler hacking.

http://suif.stanford.edu/papers/ http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/toolkit/ (devour Norman Ramsey's site and read his joint papers with Mary Fernandez; him, along with Monica Lam at Stanford, the Rice people Linda Torczon, Keith Kooper et al. are producing some of the most accessible tools and papers and certainly most exciting. The Rice group is also responsible for the best introductory compiler hacking text in recent publication: Engineering a Compiler. GET IT! If even just for the carefully curated bibliography.

Also, recently, the ACM PLDI published a list of 20 most influential papers in programming languages design and implementation:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/20-years.html

I took the time to scrape as many of them as I could off of the internet, wherever they were freely available (i.e. author's websites) and I can say I have 18 of them. I would love to share them with hungry minds in one tarball, or they can google the papers individually:

A Data Locality Optimizing Algorithm.pdf

A Safe Approximate Algorithm for Interprocedural Pointer

Aliasing.pdf

An Evaluation of Staged Run-Time Optimizations in DyC.pdf

An Implementation of Lazy Code Motion for SUIF.pdf

Analysis of Pointers and Structures.pdf

Balanced Scheduling- Instruction Scheduling When Memory Latency is Uncertain.pdf

Complete Removal of Redundant Expressions.pdf

Global Register Allocation at Link Time.pdf

How To Read Floating Point Numbers Accurately.pdf

Improving Register Allocation for Subscripted Variables.pdf

Interprocedural Constant Propagation.pdf

Interprocedural Slicing Using Dependence Graphs.pdf

Lazy Code Motion.pdf

On-The-Fly Detection of Access Anomalies.pdf

Register Windows vs. Register Allocation.pdf

Soft Typing.pdf

Software Pipelining-- An Effective Scheduling Technique for VLIW Machines.pdf

The Design and Implementation of a Certifying Compiler.pdf