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IMO, you should forget about compiler engineering as working on the backend of, say, gcc, or llvm. Yes, there are such positions (e.g., intel needs people adapt
by choeger 7y ago
IMO, you should forget about compiler engineering as working on the backend of, say, gcc, or llvm. Yes, there are such positions (e.g., intel needs people adapting compilers to new processor instruction sets) but they are few and very specialized.
Instead, think about languages in general. There is a myriad of opportunities between the js eco system, JVM and .NET, things like Rust and even low-level languages like LLVM. It should be straightforward to pick features from one eco system and port them to another. Say linear types from Rust to the JVM. Pick one or two such features, port them to your favorite eco system and provide a prototype compiler/macro library on github. With that kind of experience under your belt, you should be the goto guy for any software company that does tooling in that ecosystem. From that vantage point you could start looking for ever more interesting work.
- alexgmcm 7y agoI wonder if the growth of "low-code" will lead to many more well designed domain specific languages. LookML in Looker is one example I can think of - imo it has enabled Looker to solve the self-service data issue much better via a low-code approach than Tableau and Qlikview (both "no-code").
- pklee 7y agoThis is absolutely valid. There is a comprehensive analytics platform that I work on where we went from (a litany of) REST services to our own domain language. It not only allowed us to go across databases (Graph / RDF / RDBMS) but even across processing engines (R/Python). This is really where I think the industry should go. I am sure someone will point out there is a great talk by Brian Kernighan on this on youtube.
- pklee 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg4U4r_AgJU
- diN0bot 7y agominor nit: please use “goto person” if you’d like to keep all readers connected to your writing. (or use “goto woman” to subvert so-called typical practitioner expectations) thank you for considering
- vips7L 7y agoPlease stop posting things like this.