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Good point; this topic has been discussed previously and a number of alternatives have been plausibly mentioned - Appel's book has a lot of fans. The original

Good point; this topic has been discussed previously and a number of alternatives have been plausibly mentioned - Appel's book has a lot of fans. The original article is very vague as to what the alternatives to reading a 'just' reading 94K words + a contentious paper on pass structure might be. One suspects heavyweight contenders like the Dragon Book, Muchnick, and Cooper and Torczon are being set up as strawmen. There are a lot of compiler books which aren't suitable for the task; there is way too much in those last three books for someone who is just looking to 'bang out a compiler as quick as possible'. Building a compiler by yourself is a noble goal, but the definition of success is pretty fluid. Person A might build a heck of a compiler for a 'little language' by bolting an ANTLR frontend to an LLVM backend and learn a lot. Person B might hand-build a recursive descent parser and spit out a simple stack-based IR which she runs in an hand-crafted interpreter. Both would have learned a lot, in radically different directions.

timtadh 15y ago
I am not sure anyone would think you could learn how to write a compiler from scratch from Muchnick's book. It is a fantastic book, easily one of the best CS books I have ever read. However, the author makes it pretty clear from the get go that it isn't a book to learn to write a compiler. You should already know how to do that. It is a book to learn to write a really good production optimizing compiler. He expects a lot from his readers, and if you don't have the background you will quickly give up (as I did the first time I tried to read it). I learned to write a compiler from the Dragon Book. I taught myself how to do it. It took me several years to become good at it. However, I consider that experience invaluable. While, the original article advocated just diving in to the compiler without a lot of background on lexing and parsing. I personally wasn't happy until I had written my own parser generator and fast regex engine (which I learn how to do from Russ Cox's excellent articles on the subject).

timtadh 15y ago

I am not sure anyone would think you could learn how to write a compiler from scratch from Muchnick's book. It is a fantastic book, easily one of the best CS books I have ever read. However, the author makes it pretty clear from the get go that it isn't a book to learn to write a compiler. You should already know how to do that. It is a book to learn to write a really good production optimizing compiler. He expects a lot from his readers, and if you don't have the background you will quickly give up (as I did the first time I tried to read it). I learned to write a compiler from the Dragon Book. I taught myself how to do it. It took me several years to become good at it. However, I consider that experience invaluable. While, the original article advocated just diving in to the compiler without a lot of background on lexing and parsing. I personally wasn't happy until I had written my own parser generator and fast regex engine (which I learn how to do from Russ Cox's excellent articles on the subject).