Took Dr. Thain's compilers class in college! It was the best. He's an excellent instructor, and the course project made me build a working C-style compiler step by step. I think the sample project here is pretty much the project we did; highly recommend following through the entire thing!
Sometimes I see people who design languages and build compilers, and I find them truly amazing. I once tried making a language myself because I was curious, but it was so difficult that I just settled for a simple C backend. The people contributing to LLVM probably know everything down to assembly generation.
they're truly incredible.
Assembly generation is actually pretty simple, it's optimizing everything that's difficult. Writing an assembler is a great way to get acquainted with compiler construction, because you don't need to think about optimization and types and the other features that make high level languages complicated aren't needed.
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