> How does one generally get to work on compilers? Is it mostly through academia? Through open source contributions to compilers? You can just do it! As a pla

> How does one generally get to work on compilers? Is it mostly through academia? Through open source contributions to compilers? You can just do it! As a place to start I'd recommend looking for tutorials on recursive-descent parsing, and just try to make a program that parses a toy language and transpiles it into C, or some other language you're familiar with. Then you can grow it from there. You can get really fancy with things automatic parser generation, and using an LLVM back-end to enable optimization, but writing a simple compiler is a reasonable project for someone with even a basic handle on programming and a little creativity to just jump in and figure out.