Love such topics and articles in midst of AI topics/noise.

> I guarantee

How do you guarantee it, exactly? AI told you in an authoritative tone?

You're absolutely right!

Took Dr. Thain's compilers class in college! It was the best. He's an excellent instructor, and the course project made me build a working C-style compiler step by step. I think the sample project here is pretty much the project we did; highly recommend following through the entire thing!

Just scannning the table of contents and I don't see any of the major topics of language design. It seems to be more like just "intro to compilers"

This looks like an undergrad-level walkthrough through key topics of how a language works. Say, python or ruby, or simpler pascal compilers.

Both compilers and language design are as old as this industry, and have too much knowledge for a single course.

This one is ok, better than most similar courses based on, say, the dragon book.

Good read. Impressive how ot sharpens past knowledge with great examples.

it wanders within a tight circle around C and its idiosyncrasies.

Probably by design.

> This book offers a one semester introduction [...] enabling the reader to build a simple compiler that accepts a *C-like language*

Then it is really not about language design... I would rather recommend https://www.plai.org/

Sometimes I see people who design languages and build compilers, and I find them truly amazing. I once tried making a language myself because I was curious, but it was so difficult that I just settled for a simple C backend. The people contributing to LLVM probably know everything down to assembly generation. they're truly incredible.

Assembly generation is actually pretty simple, it's optimizing everything that's difficult. Writing an assembler is a great way to get acquainted with compiler construction, because you don't need to think about optimization and types and the other features that make high level languages complicated aren't needed.

I actually started my first compiler my allowing (only) inline assembler first, and then starting to wrap higher level constructs around it.

It adds a little bit of complexity (you need to be very clear on how you handle registers) but it worked surprisingly well, and it makes it easy to built up the complexity step by step.

It also meant I could bootstrap the compiler itself with just an assembler.

Sadly I lost the source decades ago.

(Making assembler an integral construct of a higher-level language is also not a unique approach - there's Randall Hyde's High-Level Assembly[1] and others.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Level_Assembly

I keep saying 'someday...' and never actually doing it because of making a living, but this time I think I should try a few small examples

I fell you, My dream is to build my own compiler for WASM to use it later for my own pet projects. But after 9-5 job I'm exhusted and only able to work for max 1 hour.

But I still have hope that I will make it. Maybe coding agent will help me but I dont like the idea that I need help from AI to build this. I want to create compilers through my own hands.

Anyway, I hope you will make it anyway. :)

Honestly whipping up a lexer/parser and a REPL is one of my favorite ways to learn a new language. You can cover a lot of ground in a "real" language by just doing the frontend implementation of your own made-up language grammar and a little eval loop and its great for learning/teaching because you don't get bogged down in trying to solve some actual problem.

Which is to say: no shame in just settling for that simple C backend!

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=swordlucky666 - Sort of embarrassing that anyone vouched for this comment. Reading their history, they copy/paste the same comment or use an autogenerator (probably not an LLM, that'd produce better results) to generate comments like this one.

Here's a comical one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445529

> The discussion on Spanish traders set the standa raises interesting points. In practical applications, the key challenge is balancing performance with maintainability. Would be valuable to see more concrete examples of trade-offs. [emphasis added]

They glob out part of the submission title (and took too much and cut off in the middle of a word) generating a delightful nonsense descriptor (the italicized bit). The title being:

> Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design

> Sort of embarrassing that anyone vouched for this comment

I'm the one who vouched it. I don't check commenters' history before doing it. Maybe I should. My LLM-detector is apparently broken (especially on short posts). At face value I saw nothing wrong with it, so I vouched it.

I often check the history for comments that start off [dead] because I like to see if:

1. There's a problem with the account (and then inform them and maybe notify the mods myself). Sometimes people get shadowbanned without good reason (usually the result of automoderation, not an explicit human moderator action) or for something that happened years ago, but their history is pretty clean since.

2. To see if the person is just a spammer (as is the case here).

Though I only do this if the comment seems like something that oughtn't be dead (as this one does on a first glance). The comment is shallow, but not necessarily wrong or bad. It just adds little to the discussion since it boils down to "The book is an introductory text." which we also get from reading the submission title.

Yeah, I take the same approach, and as much as I'm generally very pro AI use, to the point I wouldn't really mind AI comments if they added value (but it's fine it'll remain against the rules here), it really has become necessary to read the comments history before vouching, sadly, given they all seem to be low quality noise.

Hence why it's an "introduction" :)