Development of the foundation of a programming language

[max haughton]

On Monday, 13 September 2021 at 04:08:53 UTC, rikki cattermole 
wrote:
>
> On 13/09/2021 3:21 PM, leikang wrote:
>> Are there any recommended books or videos to learn about the 
>> principles of compilation? What else should I learn besides 
>> the principles of compilation?
>
> The classic book on compilers that Walter recommends is the 
> dragon book.
>
> https://smile.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques-Tools-2nd-dp-0321486811/dp/0321486811
>
> (D Language Foundation is a charity Amazon Smile recognizes).

The dragon book is really really showing it's age these days so I 
would highly recommend getting a copy but not reading it fully. 
"Engineering a compiler" is much better pedagogically. The dragon 
book barely mentions SSA for example, although the sections they 
did properly bother to update towards the end are quite 
interesting.

"Crafting interpreters" is quite good, I recommend it for 
learning how to actually write a parser without getting bogged 
down in totally useless theory.

Stephen Muchnick's "Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation" 
is *the* bible for optimizations, but uses a very weird 
unimplemented language so be careful for bugs.

"Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A 
Dependence-based Approach" is the only book I'm aware of that 
actually covers even the beginnings of modern loop optimizations 
thoroughly. Even this however is still somewhat set back by it 
being written 20 years ago, the principles are the same but the 
instinct is not i.e. memory latency is worse, ILP is much better.

What all of these books have in common, by the way, is that they 
were all written at a time when it was assumed that x86 would go 
the way of the dodo. So there is a somewhat significant deviation 
from "theory" and practice in some parts as (say) x86 SIMD is 
quite different from how the authors of the aforementioned book 
expected the world to go.