Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 08:38:42 -0300, Salvador Mirzo
<smirzo@antartida.xyz> wrote:


>antispam@fricas.org writes:
>
>> John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
>>> The authors developed a compiler for a toy language targeting Raspberry Pi
>>> using lex and yacc. Nothing very new but it shows how you build a
>>> compiler incremntally expanding the source language.
>>>
>>> https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04503
>>
>> I am affraid that the best use of this paper is to forget it.
>> On one hand presentation is very naive and their "final"
>> compiler apparently does not handle things handled in ususal toy
>> compilers. On the other hand their presentation has a lot of
>> gaps and mistakes, so that a newbie is unlikely to be able to
>> follow them.
>
>Would you recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these
>short-comings but maintains the educational spirit of the paper? (It's
>okay if the architecture is not a popular one.)
>[Good question. There's the old Let's Build a Compiler which you can find
>on my web site and some books. Alan Holub wrote a well known book but the
>code in the book is incredibly buggy so I wouldn't recommend it. -John]


The Racket lanaguage (which is a Scheme variant) has a framework
called nanopass designed deliberately for teaching compilers.
https://docs.racket-lang.org/nanopass/index.html




I don't have URLs for papers (sorry!), but over the years, some groups
have written about using nanopass in compiler courses.


If Scheme(-like) is not to your liking, the ideas of nanopass have
been adopted and implemented in some other languages. Search engines
are your friend.

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