There’s a principle called “eating your own dogfood”. By using a tool, you demonstrate the usefulness of the tool. It is often asked, “if the compiler for language X isn’t written in language X, why should I risk using it?” This of course only applies to languages suitable for the domain of compiler writing.
This is nothing new. C compilers have been written in C. Python has been written in Python. It’s possible to use a compiler for Language X to compile a newer version of itself, with more features. It’s called bootstrapping. Bootstrapping a language Writing a compiler in its own language How do you write a compiler … Read more
If there is no undefined behavior, but there is definite broken behavior (either deterministic normal bugs, or indeterminate like race-conditions), it pays to turn off optimization so you can step through your code with a debugger. Typically, when I reach this kind of state, I like to do a combination of: debug build (no optimizations) … Read more
Lambda lifting is used to turn a closure into a pure function. By passing extra arguments to the function, you reduce the number of its free variables. As you “lift” the lambda into higher and higher scopes, you add arguments to accommodate the local variables declared in that scope (which would be free variables otherwise). … Read more
Your understanding is pretty close; the trick is that most compilers will never write system calls, because the functions that programs call (e.g. getpid(2), chdir(2), etc.) are actually provided by the standard C library. The standard C library contains the code for the system call, whether it is called via INT 0x80 or SYSENTER. It’d … Read more
GCC is a big bag of software. The typical process, as I understand it, is for a GCC frontend to lex and parse the code, convert to GCC’s internal Register Transfer Language (RTL), and then for a backend to write out native code. So one typical flow is: C code —> GCC’s C frontend —> … Read more
Visual Studio Code is just an editor, which features their intellisense thingy and some git and debugger integration. EDIT: more info here: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs
For C# I don’t believe there’s a specified hard limit. (Section 2.4.2 of the C# 5 spec doesn’t give a limit, for example.) Roslyn v2.2.0.61624 seems to have a limit of 1024 characters; this is way beyond the bounds of readability and even a sensible machine-generated name. For Java, section 3.8 of the spec states: … Read more
The premises behind the question are a bit dodgy. It is not true that interpreted languages are mostly ducktyped. It is not true that compiled languages mostly have strong typing. The type system is a property of a language. Compiled versus interpreted is a property of an implementation. Examples: The programming language Scheme is dynamically … Read more
Good test suites for real languages are expensive to create and maintain. There’s a reason that the Plum Hall test suite, which is industry standard for ANSI C, is so bloody expensive. George Necula’s translation validation is a brilliant idea but also quite expensive to implement. The one thing that’s cheap and easy is this: maintain … Read more