Welcome to Compiler Programming!¶

This site aims to bring together practical knowledge regarding the design and implementation of optimizing compilers and interpreters for Programming Languages.

There are a number of books on Compilers and Interpreters however only a very few of them are accompanied by source code that implements the topics covered by the book. See below for a list of useful learning projects that do include source code.

In recent years, thanks to LLVM, new programming language design has become a fertile space. New Language implementations tend to focus on the language front-end, leveraging LLVM as the back-end for code optimization and code generation. While this is beneficial if you only care about the language design aspects, it is unhelpful for the industry as a whole, because the back-end of an optimizing compiler is a very interesting component, with a rich history of algorithms and data structures, and is a subject worthy of study on its own.

We will cover both front-end and back-end techniques. We will implement a small scale language as a way to learn various techniques, see what the common challenges are and how to address them. Language design not being our goal, we will keep the language as simple as possible so that it allows us to focus on important implementation issues.

Initially we will start with a procedural language. Later we will add features such as closures from functional languages and classes and objects from OOP languages. We will also look at advanced front end techniques such as type inference and generics.

The language will be statically typed to start with because this allows us to investigate the traditional compiler optimization pipeline. Dyamically typed languages have their own interesting engineering problems. We will eventually look at gradual typing and dynamic typing.