Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024)

The other goal of the course is to give a taste of modern software development, specifically: test-driven development, version control, and the stress on reading, comprehending and extending code rather than writing from scratch. The characteristic of the course is an iterative, incremental development: we start with the most trivial source language, develop the full compiler for it, and then keep extending the source language and the compiler in small steps, reusing the earlier work as much as possible. At each iteration, we build a complete end-to-end compiler producing runnable and testable executables, for a (progressively larger) subset of the source language. Another characteristic is the extensive use of tagless-final style, taking the full advantage of extensibility afforded by it. The extensibility here means reuse -- of type-checked and compiled artifacts from the previous increment -- rather than copy-paste. The compiler is hence structured as a stack of domain-specific la ... Read full article.