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

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  Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2025-01-09 09:18 -0500
    Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> - 2025-01-11 09:15 -0500
      Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> - 2025-01-12 16:15 -0500
    Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language antispam@fricas.org - 2025-01-16 13:46 +0000
      Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@antartida.xyz> - 2025-01-20 08:38 -0300
        Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> - 2025-01-20 11:17 -0500
          Re: lecture notes on compilers, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler Fernando Magno Quintao Pereira <pronesto@gmail.com> - 2025-01-21 13:33 -0300
          Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2025-01-21 19:44 -0500
            Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> - 2025-01-23 20:49 -0500
              Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2025-01-25 19:07 -0500
          Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2025-01-23 13:56 -0800
        Re: Books on writing a compiler, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler antispam@fricas.org - 2025-01-21 12:01 +0000
          Re: Books on writing a compiler, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler antispam@fricas.org - 2025-01-21 18:45 +0000
        Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language George Neuner <gneuner2@comcast.net> - 2025-01-21 19:54 -0500
          Re: Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language Dmitri Volkov <dmitri.s.volkov@gmail.com> - 2025-01-23 15:54 -0500

#3619 — Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language

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

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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#3620

On 2025-01-09 09:18, John R Levine 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 wish that they had proofread the pdf before posting.  Various pieces
of yacc/lex code are missing.

OF.
[It's just a draft and the authors' actual contact addresses are on that
web page.  How about writing to them and asking them to put in the
missing code?  People update arXiv papers all the time. -John]

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#3622

On 2025-01-11 09:15, Our Moderator suggested:

> [It's just a draft and the authors' actual contact addresses are on that
> web page.  How about writing to them and asking them to put in the
> missing code?  People update arXiv papers all the time. -John]

Thank you for the suggestion.  As I double-checked the pages, I
discovered that it was my Lexmark at fault.  So I converted from PDF 1.7
to PDF 1.3 and it printed in its entirety.

OF.
[That's strange.  They try not to do anything clever when generating the PDFs. -John]

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#3623

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.
--
                              Waldek Hebisch

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#3624

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]

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#3625

On 2025-01-20 06:38, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
> 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]

What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
notwithstanding)?  There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
much substance.

(Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
to the output.)

OF.

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#3627 — Re: lecture notes on compilers, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler

Hi Salvador,

> 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.)

I’ve recently made the lecture notes that I use in the Compiler
Construction course available in a book-like format. You can find the
PDF here: https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~fernando/classes/dcc053/.

The table of contents is also available on that page. These lecture
notes primarily focus on constructing a compiler for a purely
functional subset of SML/NJ. Most chapters include links to supporting
code. However, the full compiler isn’t provided, as I use it as a
project assignment.

In this project, students develop the compiler in 15 steps, starting
with an interpreter for arithmetic expressions and culminating in a
RISC-V code generator for a language with anonymous functions (though
closure conversion isn’t required in the test cases).

Please note that it’s still a work in progress, and feedback is welcome.

Kind regards,

Fernando

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#3629

On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:17:21 -0500, OrangeFish
<OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
>notwithstanding)?  There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
>much substance.
>
>(Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
>to the output.)
>
>OF.

The English version is fairly simplistic - an undergrad intro course
at best.  I haven't seen the German version.

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#3633

On 2025-01-21 19:44, George Neuner wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Jan 2025 11:17:21 -0500, OrangeFish
> <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
>> notwithstanding)?  There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
>> much substance.
>>
>> (Another question is where to look for how to add debugging information
>> to the output.)
>>
>> OF.
>
> The English version is fairly simplistic - an undergrad intro course
> at best.  I haven't seen the German version.

I was suggesting Wirth to answer Salvador Misro's request for "Would you
recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings
but maintains the educational spirit of the paper?".

Is Wirth (in any version) suitable?

OF.

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#3634

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 20:49:51 -0500, OrangeFish
<OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>I was suggesting Wirth to answer Salvador Misro's request for "Would you
>recommend an equivalent paper or book that addresses these short-comings
>but maintains the educational spirit of the paper?".
>
>Is Wirth (in any version) suitable?

Wirth's books are fine for dipping your toes in the ocean of language
implementation.  They are pretty well written and they cover the
entire compiler from parsing to code generation.

However, they are undergrad level at best - I have yet to see Wirth
demonstrates any significant optimizations [middle or back end], or
any attempt at implementing a functional language.  SFAIHS, everything
he has written has been about either procedural or OO implementation.

[My impression is that the largest difference between old compiler books
and the state of the art is that optimization and the analysis that enables
it has gotten vastly more sophisticated.  Back when the Dragon Book was first
written, compilers often had to fit in 64K and if you wanted to keep the
intermediate code in memory, you couldn't compile very big programs. -John]

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#3632

OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid> writes:
> On 2025-01-20 06:38, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
>> 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]
>
> What are expert opinions on Wirth's book Compilerbau (German
> notwithstanding)?  There seem to love-it or hate-it opinions without
> much substance.

The English version, "Compiler Construction", is available in free PDF
form at <https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/>.

    Compiler Construction
    Niklaus Wirth
    This is a slightly revised version of the book published by
    Addison-Wesley in 1996
    ISBN 0-201-40353-6
    Zürich, May 2017

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */

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#3626 — Re: Books on writing a compiler, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler

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]

I like very much old presentation of PL/0 in Wirth book "Algoritms
+ Data Structures = Programs".  Unfortunately, it is available in
old edition of the book but missing in newer ones.  Presentation is
in Pascal which seem to be unknown to current students.  Wirth uses
hand coded LL parser (unlike texts depending on parser generators).
Code generator covers only imaginary stack machine which is
interpreted (one cound instead generate machine code, but Wirth does
not explain this).  PL/0 compiler does not cover type-checking, but
there is PL/S which is similar, but shows more realistic language
including types.

Wirth "Compiler Construction" book available on the net contains
examples of Oberon-like compiler, about 20 pages.  This is
written in Oberon, which may be a problem.

For compiler course that I gave in the past I developed my own
examples.  One is variation on Wirth PL/0, but using flex and
bison for syntax and generating code for x86_64.  If interested
see:

/zaj/public_html/kompi2015/pr

and look for links to subdirectories of 'pl0'.  Version 1
is just lexical analyzer for 'flex', version 2 contains bison
grammar, version 3 builds a parse tree, version 4 builds
simplified parse tree, version 5 adds a code generator.

There are comments inside, but course was in Polish, so comments
and variable names are in Polish too.

Note: this is phase-by-phase approach.  Enlarging language
may be tricky, unless one is subsetting compiler for bigger
language.  And even when subsetting, there can be unexpected
dependence: code for expressions may need intermediate variables,
so general expressions and variables naturally appear together
in code generator.

I also made somewhat simpler example 'sk' (reachable from the
URL I gave above).  This one trivializes syntax, using one letter
variable names and precedence based parser, but contains
"retargetable" code generator (one version generates normal C,
one i386 code, one multiprecision C).

In the past I fetched several compiler books from the net.
"Compiler Construction; A Practical Approach" by F.J.F. Benders
J.W. Haaring, T.H. Janssen, D. Meffert and A.C. van Oostenrijk
contains simple compiler for toy language called "Inger".

--
                              Waldek Hebisch

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#3628 — Re: Books on writing a compiler, was Paper: Developing a Modular Compiler

antispam@fricas.org wrote:
 For compiler course that I gave in the past I developed my own
> examples.  One is variation on Wirth PL/0, but using flex and
> bison for syntax and generating code for x86_64.  If interested
> see:
>
> /zaj/public_html/kompi2015/pr

Oops, I should give a link instead of a filname:

http://fricas.org/~p-wyk4/kompi2015/pr

--
                              Waldek Hebisch

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#3630

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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#3631

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

I went through Jeremy Siek's Essentials of Compilation last year, and
found it very effective. Nanopass-based, and there's both Racket and
Python versions of the book.

I believe it's available on GitHub: https://github.com/IUCompilerCourse

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