3 ms·
It's not a warning not to build a compiler, it's more of a story about how feature bloat might cause one to inadvertantly build a compiler without realizing tha
by a_shovel 5y ago
It's not a warning not to build a compiler, it's more of a story about how feature bloat might cause one to inadvertantly build a compiler without realizing that's what they were doing. The last line reveals it by telling us that each of those "features" was actually a standard compiler component:
> Done at last, you say to yourself, without having to build a compiler.
> A parser, an intermediate representation, transformation passes, and a code generator. Dear Sir, you have built a compiler.
- rachitnigam 5y ago[OP] Yup, that was the intent. I've seen a lot of academic and industrial hand wringing about not wanting to build a compiler because it's an overkill for the solution only to have the people come back 6 months later having built a compiler. I'm not saying everyone should build a compiler for everything–but when you should build a compiler, you really should bite the bullet and build a compiler.