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Yeah, I think a more appropriate statement would have been "If you don't know how compilers work, you don't know how software works".
by the_duke 10y ago
Yeah, I think a more appropriate statement would have been "If you don't know how compilers work, you don't know how software works".
- nickpsecurity 10y agoAgain, software in most HLL's that uses compilers. There's assembly, macro assemblers, and some HLL's close to the metal. For the later, you can get a list of what various constructs will look like as assembly, heuristics on what to use where, and still don't need to know compilers.
- the_duke 10y agoBut almost all software today is written in a high level language (above C). And even in C, optimizations can change your code quite a lot. So I do think having a basic udnerstanding of how compilers work under the hood should be required for every programmer. As I said elswhere, every proper programmer should write at least one toy language with a compiler and / or interpreter.