Unit testing a compiler

From	"Rafael R. Sevilla" <dido@imperium.ph>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Unit testing a compiler
Date	2013-03-13 11:50 +0800
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<13-03-009@comp.compilers> (permalink)

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I am currently writing a simple byte compiler for a simple dialect of
Lisp, and am wondering what is the best practice for testing such a
compiler.  It is certainly possible to run the compiler on some test
code and then compare the code it generates with some reference code,
but as the code samples become more complicated that rapidly becomes
unwieldy.  Would it instead be better to test the compiler by actually
running the code it generates, and then comparing the results with what
the code snippet is supposed to evaluate to?  Any other ideas on how to
go about testing the code generator?  What about when optimizations are
being performed?

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Unit testing a compiler "Rafael R. Sevilla" <dido@imperium.ph> - 2013-03-13 11:50 +0800
  Re: Unit testing a compiler BGB <cr88192@hotmail.com> - 2013-03-13 02:59 -0500
  Re: Unit testing a compiler Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com> - 2013-03-13 18:58 -0400
  Re: Unit testing a compiler Walter Banks <walter@bytecraft.com> - 2013-03-19 18:02 -0500

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