Compiler construction

Compiler construction is an area of computer science that deals with the theory and practice of developing programming languages and their associated compilers.

The theoretical portion is primarily concerned with syntax, grammar and semantics of programming languages. One could say that this gives this particular area of computer science a strong tie with linguistics. Some courses on compiler construction will include a simplified grammar of a spoken language that can be used to form a valid sentence for the purposes of providing students with an analogy to help them understand how grammar works for programming languages.

The practical portion covers actual implementation of compilers for languages. Students will typically end up writing the front end of a compiler for a simplistic teaching language, such as Micro.

Subfields

• Parsing
• Program analysis
• Program transformation
• Compiler or program optimization
• Code generation

See also

• Functional compiler
• Programming language implementation

Further reading

• Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, Jeffrey D. Ullman. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.
• Michael Wolfe. High-Performance Compilers for Parallel Computing. ISBN 978-0805327304

External links

• The ACE CoSy compiler development suite, an industry leading C/C++ compiler development suite.
• The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project, The leading open source compiler tools project.
• Let's Build a Compiler, by Jack Crenshaw, An interesting tutorial on compiler construction.

• Compiler Construction at the University of New England