I’ve worked on multiple compilers (optimizations expert) at MSFT on VS and CUDA and gave developed a DSL and worked on Database Compilers. I can’t hire compiler people with right skills. We’re building an IDE and those parsers are written differently, and we use Scala packrat parser combinators. These courses teach very little judgement or industry relevant stuff. When do you use packrat parser vs LALR vs LL? Good luck hiring an engineer with advanced compiler courses knowing any of this. I’d like to sit down all university professors who teach compiler courses and teach them a course on what’s relevant.

Domain-specific compilers are a bigger field, where there's more opportunity to do something interesting

Take C (or some other language) and its mature optimizing compilers as a foundation, and write a program that compiles a high-level description of a domain-specific program into C

For example, NN-512 (https://NN-512.com) is a compiler that takes as input a simple text description of a convolutional neural net inference graph and produces as output a stand-alone C implementation of that graph

GNU Bison (https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/) is another example, where the output is a parser: Bison reads a specification of a context-free language, warns about any parsing ambiguities, and generates a parser (either in C, C++, or Java) which reads sequences of tokens and decides whether the sequence conforms to the syntax specified by the grammar

Halide (https://halide-lang.org/) is a language for fast, portable computation on images and tensors, and it originally generated human-readable C++ code as output (but not anymore, now it feeds directly into LLVM)

Can anyone provide other examples? (Code generators for network packet processing?)

A fantastic submission, very much appreciated.

I find the presentation style of subtitles with surrounding context extremely helpful. I often lose the ability to listen when concentrating; the subtitle context provides a superior recovery mechanism to the usual, try to work out what was missed. I look forward to purchasing augmented reality glasses at some point in the future which add this advantage to in-person interactions.

I love this line...

“Real 6120 also has an end-of-semester course project—in the self-guided version, your end-of-semester assignment is to change the world through the magic of compilers”

I wish they’d be more courses on compilers that also serve as language servers. The current world is moving towards a phase where a language needs IDE tooling such as compilers, linters, formatters, REPL, language servers, debuggers and profilers.

Would love to see a high level course that covers how to build the tooling for a great developer experience.

Anyone interested in following the course together during the holidays? To keep each other motivated etc.

On the related note, what would you guys recommend as an introduction to compilers, say for beginners?

Even if you don't do the course, the first paper they list is a fascinating must-read:

Producing Wrong Data Without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong! Todd Mytkowicz, Amer Diwan, Matthias Hauswirth, and Peter F. Sweeney. ASPLOS 2009.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2528521.1508275

I happened to be at that ASPLOS and I thought it was fascinating. Good to see it recognized as one of the most important papers in compilers.

Has anyone taken Compilers course from David Beazley: https://www.dabeaz.com/compiler.html. I'd love to hear your feedback, please

I took the undergraduate version of this course while at Cornell. It was a wonderful course. I taught me a lot how computers work, and how to organize a large (for me at the time) software project.

One of the most painful parts of the the project was using Scala which had ridiculously long compile times which made iterating quite a pain.

My favorite memory was that for one project we had to submit a program written meant to stress test everyone's parser.

The course materials look good.

But what is a "PhD level course"? All I've seen is undergrad and graduate, and the difference between masters and PhD has nothing to do with classes.

Well, I don't feel like cleaning the basement or finishing my yard work before the snow, so I might just do this course over the holiday instead.

Any idea if I can jump right into this after my only experience being Crafting Interpreters?

They should renumber it CS 6502.

This course is asynchronously delivered.

Question for students: how do you find synchronous courses with some discussions during class, vs asynchronous courses where discussions are limited to an online written forum or office hours?

I'm interested by the topic but I'm a junior backend/data eng, do you think it could be helpful for my profile to dig into the concepts of compilers other than for the culture itself?

What would be some cool use cases to design your own compiler?

Nice, although I'd have wanted a segment on compiler testing.

Oh, compiler construction :) I really enjoyed that lecture during my M.Sc.

"parallelization, just-in-time compilation, and garbage collection" sound fun, too. Especially JIT.

It's great that there's a lecture on dynamic compilation - so often overlooked.

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing.

No code generation?

What a treat. Thanks for this submission.