I found the following resources helpful for understanding type inference, in order of increasing difficulty: Chapter 30 (Type Inference) of the freely available book PLAI, Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, sketches unification-based type inference. The summer course Interpreting types as abstract values presents elegant evaluators, type checkers, type reconstructors and inferencers using Haskell as a … Read more
Is there a way to actually write a compiler in its own language? You have to have some existing language to write your new compiler in. If you were writing a new, say, C++ compiler, you would just write it in C++ and compile it with an existing compiler first. On the other hand, if … Read more
=====> COMPILATION PROCESS <====== | |—-> Input is Source file(.c) | V +=================+ | | | C Preprocessor | | | +=================+ | | —> Pure C file ( comd:cc -E <file.name> ) | V +=================+ | | | Lexical Analyzer| | | +—————–+ | | | Syntax Analyzer | | | +—————–+ | | … Read more
This is based on the Expression Evaluator grammar by Terrence Parr. The grammar for this example: grammar Expr002; options { output=AST; ASTLabelType=CommonTree; // type of $stat.tree ref etc… } prog : ( stat )+ ; stat : expr NEWLINE -> expr | ID ‘=’ expr NEWLINE -> ^(‘=’ ID expr) | NEWLINE -> ; expr … Read more
The definition you have quoted above is too general for a beginner to understand completely and so let me just simplify it to something we see practically. Compiler: is an umbrella term to describe a program that takes source code written in one language and produce a (or many) output file in some other language. … Read more
Assembly instructions are (generally) a direct mapping to opcodes, which are (multi-)byte values of machine code that can be directly interpreted by the processor. It is quite possible to write a program in opcodes directly by looking them up from a table (such as this one for the 6039 microprocessor, for example) that lists them … Read more
This is called “bootstrapping”. You must first build a compiler (or interpreter) for your language in some other language (usually Java or C). Once that is done, you can write a new version of the compiler in language Foo. You use the first bootstrap compiler to compile the compiler, and then use this compiled compiler … Read more
Big List of Resources: A Nanopass Framework for Compiler Education ¶ Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation $ An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction ¶ ANTLR 3.x Video Tutorial Basics of Compiler Design Building a Parrot Compiler Compiler Basics Compiler Construction $ Compiler Design and Construction $ Crafting a Compiler with C $ Crafting Interpreters [Compiler … Read more
One easy way to understand “ABI” is to compare it to “API”. You are already familiar with the concept of an API. If you want to use the features of, say, some library or your OS, you will program against an API. The API consists of data types/structures, constants, functions, etc that you can use … Read more