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Comment by pyvpx | Hacker News Reader

as someone who has never written a compiler but has an intense interest in doing so, this is also very welcomed!

Now is is a great time to write your first compiler. The wealth of tools and docs these days is breathtaking. Give it a go!

I wrote a toy compiler a very long time ago and I'd like to try again. Do you have any links/recommendations for resources that would be a good starting place?

LLVM Kaleidoscope, or if you'd like to start with your own toy CPU, then nand2tetris on Coursera.

I bet you have, but if not, do yourself a favour and grab a copy of "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" aka "The Dragon Book".

Still got my copy from uni, dog-eared and sticky-noted throughout.

I recall the classic 1986 edition of the Dragon Book spending waaaay too much time on boring details of lexing and parsing. I think it turned many people off the interesting aspects of compilers. It also had an interval-based formulation of data-flow analysis that nobody uses, possibly because it's (a) more complex than worklist iteration, and (b) not applicable to irreducible control flow graphs.

Are newer editions better and more focused on interesting solutions to interesting problems?

Try the Tiger Book instead (a.k.a. 'Modern compiler implementation in C', or there are Java or ML versions if those are more to your taste). It has a better balance: more to the point treatment of lexing and parsing, leaving more space for a more comprehensive treatment of optimization and code generation.

I second it, even if the book has a few issues here and there, it was one of the best books I read on the subject.

I recommend making sure to avoid reading this book, it spends all its time making mountains out of molehills in the easy parts and leaves out the hard parts. How did they write so many pages about text parsing?

The books by Appel and Louden (forgot the names) are good.

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