Crafting Interpreters has been great. It starts with an AST-walking interpreter (in Java), so you get to focus on parsing and the simplest form of interpretation, and then it moves to a bytecode interpreter (in C) so you get to learn about compiling to a more primitive target via a lower-level language (much of which should translate to a "real" compiler). Very approachable, has lots of side-context and an entertaining style. The language you interpret was custom-designed for the course, which helps a lot, and resembles a simplified JavaScript without all the messy parts.
Particularly (in alphabetical order--I think these are all great, so including highlights of what I've liked about them):
- IU P423/P523: Compilers (Programming Language Implementation) - Jeremy Siek, with the course book "Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach" (pretty interesting approach, with programming language features developed incrementally having a fully working compiler at each step, cf. http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf; implementation language Racket),
- KAIST CS420: Compiler Design - Jeehoon Kang (good modern treatment of SSA representation itself, including the use of block arguments, https://mlir.llvm.org/docs/Rationale/Rationale/#block-argume..., as well as SSA-based analysis and optimization; Rust as an implementation language),
- UCSD CSE 131: Compiler Construction - Joseph Gibbs Politz, Ranjit Jhala (great lecturers, both Haskell and OCaml edition were interesting; fun extra: one of the Fall 2019 lectures (11/26) has an interesting discussion of the trade-offs between traditional OOP and FP compiler implementation),
- UCSD CSE 231: Advanced Compiler Design - Sorin Lerner (after UCSD CSE 131: for more on analysis & optimization--data flow analysis, lattice theory, SSA, optimization; fun extra: the final Winter 2018 lecture highlighted one of my favorite papers, https://pldi15.sigplan.org/details/pldi2015-papers/31/Provab...),
- UW CSE CSEP 501: Compilers - Hal Perkins (nice balanced introduction, including x86-64 assembly code generation, with the aforementioned "Engineering a Compiler" used as the course textbook).
Thank you so much for this comment. It's incredibly difficult to find modern compiler learning resources – when I ask, I often get disparaging comments about the dragon book and not much more.
Please, consider putting this list on your blog, or somewhere more visible than a HN comment.
How's that possible? It's a "keep it under your pillow" book. Whether you read it or not is a different question. I don't know anyone in the 'hood who wouldn't have.
