Re: the long way to the development of a compiler

First of all I would like to thank all the people who replied to my
request as soon as the message appeared in the newsgroup. I am really
impressed by the competence and the friendliness of everybody.
I'll use Matthew's reply for a couple of comments.


"Matthew J.Lockner" <lockner@chaos.cns.uni.edu> wrote in message
> It's probably not what you had in mind, but I feel compelled to refer
> you to the textbook for my compiler course: Modern Compiler
> Implementation in
> (C|Java|ML) by Andrew Appel.


Many people suggested the purchase of the book. While the reviews on
Amazon are quite bad, I was also quite attracted by it (so, in a sense,
it was what I had in mind), even before I posted the message. Therefore
I decided to buy it.


Many people also recommended the book on the LCC compiler. Since the
latter is a bit pricey I'll keep it in my wish list for another while.
But I will certainly look for references on burg/iburg and the other
code selectors mentioned in the freely available papers on LCC.


> One of my planned projects on the horizon might be to see how
> well the book's methods stack up to the 6502 (I have an old C128 that
> has sadly fallen into disuse).


My planned project (it's for a friend as well as my amusement) is to
implement a compiler targeting PIC microcontrollers. I already know that
the approach should be very different (the Microchip 16c55 doesn't even
have a stack worth the name), but I thought that I could use the
occasion to learn a little bit about code generation in general.


Other people sent me papers (and thanks to those references I came
across a great site loaded with good papers, with an easy search engine,
namely http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/) as well as URL's to compilers of
various degrees of complexity. It will take time to process all this
information but, once again, I am really grateful to all those who spent
their time to collect it and send it to me.


If one day I manage to make anything out of it, I'll probably try and
summarise my experience, as well as produce a simple post for a future
FAQ.
--
WildHeart'2k1 - mailto:stf@apl.it
Homepage: http://come.to/wildheart/

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