More about "Writing a C Compiler"

[Mark Wutka]

8 years ago Jason wanted us to try writing a compiler based on Kent Dybvig's work on teaching compilers using incremental steps. It turns out that the "Writing a C Compiler" book was inspired by this paper: http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf

The author taught at IU at the time, and his paper is probably a little before the stuff Dybvig and others were doing with Scheme macros to do the microstages thing.

Also, there's an interview with the author of the book here (scroll down to season 2, episode 1:

https://www.raincodelabs.com/wespeakyourlanguage/

So far, my experience of working through the book feels like what I think Jason was hoping for 8 years ago. There's a lot of incremental work, but you start with something that takes code and generates x86_64 assembly, so you are continually working from lexing to code generation as you add new features.