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> I can write a c++ compiler in a few months. Not that it substantially distracts from your point, but I strongly doubt this. Or did you mean a heavily restric

> I can write a c++ compiler in a few months. Not that it substantially distracts from your point, but I strongly doubt this. Or did you mean a heavily restricted subset of C++? A C++ front end alone is so complex to build that these guys make a living off of licensing their front end code: https://www.edg.com/ https://www.edg.com/ (Fun fact: Microsoft rebuilt IntelliSense for C++ on the EDG front end. Yes, that Microsoft with the MSVC compiler. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rebuilding-intellisense/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/rebuilding-intellisen... and https://old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/bdt8ep/does_msvc_still_use_edg_as_c_frontend/el43m80/ https://old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/bdt8ep/does_msvc_still...) Even without compatibility cruft, you're looking at multiple 100k LOC if their code base is anything to go by. That's man-years, not man-months...

bluGill 7y ago
Edg is writing a good front end. With good error handling and all of the other things that make a commercial program a few hundred times harder than a quick prototype. I'd be writing a brute force front end that is slow, and goes straight to assembly. If there is a syntax error I'll handle it by crashing. When you create a variable is used twice in a row I'll store the intermediate value back into memory and reload it back into my register. There have been write a c++ compiler classes that did it in a semester. I think they also do the standard library. (but that might be a year long course)
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  I'm still awfully skeptical that you can get even close to understanding all the template, lookup, lifetime, lambda, exception and initialization rules in a semester (I assume that CS students are almost never this deep into C++ at that point). Not to speak of actually implementing all of it. I'd be curious where these classes draw the line. Do you happen to have a syllabus or so? I don't doubt you can implement a meaningful portion of C++ in a semester, but converting 500 pages of standardese into code within as many hours seems like an impossible goal for a class to me.
  - ruds 7y ago
    http://www.cppgm.org/ http://www.cppgm.org/ was a sort of experiment called "C++ Grand Master Certification." It seems to have died out, but the goal was to produce a self-hosted C++-11 compiler and standard library implementation. It took about a year to go from nothing to code generation in 9 programming assignments (I think I completed the first 6 before I got too busy to continue).

bluGill 7y ago

Edg is writing a good front end. With good error handling and all of the other things that make a commercial program a few hundred times harder than a quick prototype. I'd be writing a brute force front end that is slow, and goes straight to assembly. If there is a syntax error I'll handle it by crashing. When you create a variable is used twice in a row I'll store the intermediate value back into memory and reload it back into my register. There have been write a c++ compiler classes that did it in a semester. I think they also do the standard library. (but that might be a year long course)

MauranKilom 7y ago
I'm still awfully skeptical that you can get even close to understanding all the template, lookup, lifetime, lambda, exception and initialization rules in a semester (I assume that CS students are almost never this deep into C++ at that point). Not to speak of actually implementing all of it. I'd be curious where these classes draw the line. Do you happen to have a syllabus or so? I don't doubt you can implement a meaningful portion of C++ in a semester, but converting 500 pages of standardese into code within as many hours seems like an impossible goal for a class to me.
- ruds 7y ago
  http://www.cppgm.org/ http://www.cppgm.org/ was a sort of experiment called "C++ Grand Master Certification." It seems to have died out, but the goal was to produce a self-hosted C++-11 compiler and standard library implementation. It took about a year to go from nothing to code generation in 9 programming assignments (I think I completed the first 6 before I got too busy to continue).