Comment by sieve
2 days ago
If you know basic programming (js/python), a day is more than enough to get the concept across using a tiny language. Could probably be done in an hour.
The problem, always, is people are given terrible reading recommendations which makes the subject more complicated than it is.
I never took a compilers course. The first reading recommendation I got was The Dragon Book. Perhaps not the worst starting place at the time (mid 90s) but my memory of it was that the book was front-loaded with automata and parser theory. At the time I didn't really make it past the front end. It would be interesting to see a compiler tutorial that started at codegen and worked backwards (or started at the ends: lexing and codegen, and worked towards the middle in alternating chapters).
> It would be interesting to see a compiler tutorial that started at codegen and worked backwards (or started at the ends: lexing and codegen, and worked towards the middle in alternating chapters)
This is exactly how my university's compiler course did it[1]. It was really nice to start with assembly and go upwards. We had all the lexing/parsing stuff being discussed around the middle of the semester rather than being saddled with theory-heavy regex, automata theory, etc right at the beginning.
[1]: https://ilyasergey.net/CS4212/
The Dragon Book is terrible as an introduction. There are better books I would probably recommend, but not to a beginner. The best "complete" intro out there today is Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters.[1]
[1] https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html
> There are better books I would probably recommend
I'm curious what you'd recommend.
For what it's worth my goal was to compile to machine code. Anything less would have seemed insufficient. Later I got Appel's "Modern Compiler Implementation in Java" and Allen and Kennedy "Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures".
Cooper and Torczon "Engineering a Compiler" was recommended here recently. I haven't seen it.
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