A Compiler Writing Journey

parallax_error | 15 hours ago

Very cool! I can’t imagine writing everything in C, I’m currently learning this in OCaml which seems nicer for a project like this.

nurettin | 13 hours ago

Wow that's super nostalgic. You're on a great path! After doing something similar, I switched to Haskell. Give it a go if you have the time.

anta40 | 9 hours ago

Perhaps using this: https://github.com/nlsandler/nqcc2

?

MisterTea | 3 hours ago

> I can’t imagine writing everything in C

I will say that C is a perfect low level language for bootstrapping more complex systems and languages. If I were building a bootstrap compiler I would write it in C and have it emit C. Specifically C89/99 ONLY with no POSIX/GNU deps. that will guarantee a large swath of compiler and system support out of the box.

brcmthrowaway | 15 hours ago

How much of Claude was used?

azhenley | 15 hours ago

It was started 7 years ago.

Muhammad523 | 4 hours ago

Why must there always be a random guy on HN randomly mentioning Claude?

pjmlp | 10 hours ago

Having it all in C brings back memories from "Compiler Design in C" a famous book for its time, printed in 1990.

https://holub.com/compiler/

nils-m-holm | 9 hours ago

I wrote a book in its spirit in 2012 with a second edition in 2022: http://t3x.org/reload/

It is called Practical Compiler Construction. The Compiler Writing Journey is based on it.

kreco | 7 hours ago

Thanks for your amazing work!

maltyxxx | 7 hours ago

Worth also mentioning Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom (craftinginterpreters.com) as a companion — it implements two interpreters in Java then C, covering a treewalk interpreter and a bytecode VM, and is freely available online. Together with this journey and nils-m-holm's Practical Compiler Construction mentioned above, you get a remarkably complete self-study path from parsing fundamentals all the way to code generation.

On the C vs typed language debate: C forces you to think about representation explicitly — no algebraic types to lean on, every tagged union is manual. That arguably teaches you more about what a compiler actually does structurally. But OCaml or Haskell's pattern matching makes the recursive descent so natural that it's worth attempting both if you have the time. They illuminate different things.

cxr | 4 hours ago

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079>

skyfantom | 5 hours ago

This hopefully can be useful as well https://space4links.com/r/writing-a-compiler

Muhammad523 | 4 hours ago

I feel like interpreters and compilers were trendy in 2015/2016, bu i'm too young to know. Am i right?

mzs | 4 hours ago

"Part 64: Self-compilation on an 8-bit CPU"

Unlike how a bunch of projects end right as they start to get good, this has a great ending. Thank you

cxr | 3 hours ago

(2020)

Previously:

12 comments; 156 points. 2022 November 29. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33788013>

67 comments; 484 points. 2020 January 8. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21968420>