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How does a high school kid get so interested in (and manages to pull off a great article about) stuff like Intermediate Representations, compiler optimisation techniques, JITs as different as those of Julia and GraalVM, that would easily scare even a seasoned programmer with years of experience and a CompSci degree under the belt?

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You don't know many nerds, do you?

EDIT: When I was in high school, msdos and windows viruses were all the rage: self-modifying polymorphic code that injected itself into the RAM of other processes, having no identical strings longer than a few bytes between each instance of the virus, etc. Way useless than jit stuff, but a comparable level of "depth", and 100% assembly code.

I suppose I can answer this, as a high school kid: because it's interesting! I'm really interested in compilers and interpreters as well, I suppose because I think it's cool how they're so integral to all kinds of programming, and how it takes so much work to build one that can then almost magically understand what you tell it to do. I work on RustPython[0], and even though I've seen and edited the bytecode interpreter loop and the parser and the ast->bytecode compiler and all of the builtin functions and types, it's still hard to fathom that all of that is running under the hood when I type something at the REPL and it just runs.

[0]: https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython

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