Working through 'Writing A C Compiler'

122 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by AlexeyBrin
(jollygoodsw.wordpress.com)

34 Comments

sanufar

10 hours ago

I love this book! I worked through a bunch of it during my winter break last year and found the incremental teaching style extremely rewarding. For readers of the book, Sandler’s reference OCaml implementation is super useful for getting your bearings. I was kind of thrown off by the use of TACKY as an IR, but it was nice to have a solid reference as I worked through the book. For those more experienced with compilers: what are some good resources for stuff like SSA and optimisation? I’ve looked at some of the resources here https://bernsteinbear.com/pl-resources/ but are there other canonical resources?

stellalo

10 hours ago

From what the blog author says (I haven’t looked into the book), the approach reminds me of

> Abdulaziz Ghuloum, 2006, An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf

mkw5053

11 hours ago

Sounds like a great book. I worked through nand2tetris ages ago and remember enjoying it as well.

kragen

9 hours ago

This makes the book sound very well structured! I also found Ghuloum's paper inspirational.

user

8 hours ago

[deleted]

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]

jokoon

11 hours ago

The crafting interpreting asks the reader to use the visitor pattern, and this was quite a turn off for me, I stopped there.

billforsternz

an hour ago

I recall back in the day when I was an embedded systems programmer at the coal face I had similar antipathy towards a pattern. I think it was called the State pattern or similar. It involved a class hierarchy and virtual functions, one for basically every state, event pair.

I preferred my simple C design whic used a lookup table to quickly access a structure for each state, event pair instead. The structure would provide an output state, a message to send, an action to emit, a bitmask to select zero or more other standard operations, and yes a function to run in those rare cases where something really special was needed. All fields optional.

The point is I didn't need to write N x M functions, I just needed to edit a table. And I didn't need to understand any rocket science.

markus_zhang

11 hours ago

This part confused me quite a bit so I turned it into the more verbose format by copy-pasting. I don’t like the boilerplate code generation either so I converted that part too. The whole book is still pretty interesting though.

quibono

11 hours ago

Couldn't you write the interpreter without it?

UncleEntity

10 hours ago

> The crafting interpreting asks the reader to use the visitor pattern...

...or just a big old, plain jane switch statement.

In my current project I modified my ASDL generator to output a C instead of C++ AST and the visitor pattern carried over until realizing a switch statement is just as good (or better) in C so I ripped out that part of the template file. The choice was to write a dispatch function which called the various methods based on the AST node type or have a generated struct full of function pointers with a generated dispatch function which calls the various methods based on the AST node type. Same difference, really, just one has an added level of indirection.

The amazing part is I didn't rewrite the ASDL generator for the fifth time and just decided it's 'good enough' for what I need it for. Aside from one small C++ism, which is easily worked around and turns out wasn't even needed in the C++ template, the thing is 100% language and 'access pattern' agnostic in generating the output code.

There was probably a point I was trying to make when I started typing, dunno?

grg0

9 hours ago

My takeaway from your verbose description is:

- You don't need a visitor pattern if you have predetermined the data you are going to work with and all the operations on it (i.e., the open/closed principle does not apply.)

- For the same reason, you don't need dynamic dispatch, which is often how the visitor (and other) pattern(s) are implemented.

- The code is much simpler to understand (and debug) because it's all there in once place. It's also faster than the dynamic dispatch version because it's all known at compile-time.

- Personally: OOP is stupid, confusing, and inefficient; I think universities should only teach it as an optional course. These patterns are 50% lack of functional programming features and 50% sheer stupidity. Universities should go back to teaching real abstraction with Scheme and SICP, a MIPS-style assembly language, and stop confusing students.

markus_zhang

8 hours ago

I think I did something similar for an emulator. Instead of using a big switch I simply used a big array of function pointers. So if it is a BLAH opcode, the execution code simply call fp_list[BLAH](op). But I guess it is a bit too much for CPUs that have tons of operations.

almostgotcaught

10 hours ago

Lolol weirdest reason to reject that book - 90% of production parsers are recursive descent parsers.

markus_zhang

10 hours ago

It probably has nothing to do with recursive descent parsing, which is intuitive, but with the visitor pattern as mentioned. I myself find it very distracting too.

almostgotcaught

10 hours ago

.... They're the same thing....

ossopite

10 hours ago

What?

The visitor pattern is a technique for dynamic dispatch on two values (typically one represents 'which variant of data are we working with' and the other 'which operation are we performing'). You would not generally use that in recursive descent parsing, because when parsing you don't have an AST yet, so 'which variant of data' doesn't make sense, you are just consuming tokens from a stream.

almostgotcaught

9 hours ago

> you are just consuming tokens from a stream.

My guy... Do you think that parsers just like... concat tokens into tuples or something....??? Do you not understand that after lexing you have tokens (which are a "type") and AST node construction (an "operation") and that the grammar of a language is naturally a graph.... Like where else would you get the "recursion" from....

If that doesn't make sense I invite you to read some literature:

> makeAST():

> asks the tokenizer for the next token t, and then asks t to call the appropriate factory method the int token and the id token call makeLeaf(), the left parenthesis token calls makeBinOp() all other tokens should flag an error! does the above "smell" like the visitor pattern to you or not? Who are the hosts and who are the visitors?

https://www.clear.rice.edu/comp212/02-fall/labs/11/

markus_zhang

8 hours ago

OK I might be wrong about the visitor pattern, but what I really did not like is to use the accept() and visitBlah() way to execute AST nodes: https://craftinginterpreters.com/representing-code.html#the-...

I did continue reading the book (not the original author of that reply) but I do think it is distracting for newbies. I had to come back to this page over and over again to recollect memory about the pattern, because I usually read it one chapter or a few sections every week, so every time I had to remind myself how this visitBlah() and accept() pair works. I really think a big switch() (or anything that works but is simpler) would be a lot easier to understand.

The other reason I dislike this kind of stuffs is that I have someone in the team who really likes to use patterns for every piece of code. It's kinda difficult to tell whether it is over-engineering or not, but my principle is that intuition always beats less lines of code (or DRY), unless it is absurdly more lines of code or repetition. And to test that principle you just grab a newbie and see which one makes more sense to him.

mrkeen

6 hours ago

Nope, you had it right.

Visitor thoroughly confuses me in the context of parsing (maybe in all contexts.)

visit and accept are not the verbs I want to be seeing in the code. I want to see then, or, and try.

almostgotcaught

5 hours ago

Parsers "accept" or "reject" programs. It's completely standard language.

almostgotcaught

7 hours ago

> I really think a big switch() (or anything that works but is simpler) would be a lot easier to understand.

It's much easier conceptually to implement this using recursion instead of a while loop and a token stack (it's basically DFS). So I disagree with you there.

> The other reason I dislike this kind of stuffs is that I have someone in the team who really likes to use patterns for every piece of code. It's kinda difficult to tell whether it is over-engineering or not, but my principle is that intuition always beats less lines of code (or DRY), unless it is absurdly more lines of code or repetition. And to test that principle you just grab a newbie and see which one makes more sense to him

I'm with you - I really don't give a shit about patterns (which was my whole original point - who cares). But that last part I don't agree with - systems code (like a parser) doesn't need to be legible to a noob. Of course we're talking about a textbook so your probably right but like I said most production parsers and AST traversals are written exactly this same way. So anyone learning this stuff hoping to get a job doing it should just get used to it.

ossopite

8 hours ago

I see that you've found an example of how recursive descent parsing actually can be implemented with the visitor pattern, which I've never come across before, and I didn't read it carefully enough to understand the motivation - but that doesn't mean they are the same thing - the recursive descent parsers I've seen before just inspect which tokens are seen and directly construct AST nodes

as an adendum, the reason I don't understand the motivation is that the visitor pattern in the way I described it is useful when you have many different operations to perform on your AST. If you have only one operation on tokens - parsing into an AST - I'm not sure why you need dynamic dispatch on a second thing, the first thing being the token type. Maybe the construction is that different operations correspond to different 'grammar rules'?

almostgotcaught

8 hours ago

> why you need dynamic dispatch on a second thing

You're overindexing on maximally generic visitor pattern. If you have one type of visitor but nonetheless dispatch based on type that's still visitor pattern.

EDIT: to be honest who even cares. My initial point was why in the hell would you stop reading a book because a particular "pattern" offends you. And I'll reassert it here: who cares whether a recursive descent parser fits the exact definition of visitor pattern or not - you have members of a class that do stuff (construct AST nodes) and possibly track other data and then call other members. I usually call that a visitor class even if it's the only one that ever exists <shrug>

ossopite

8 hours ago

Ok, that's true, but my claim is that recursive descent parsing does not have to use the visitor pattern and indeed using recursive descent parsing is not the same as using the visitor pattern (you can do the former without the latter and I claim that you usually do)

almostgotcaught

8 hours ago

> just inspect which tokens are seen and directly construct AST nodes

I'll repeat myself: this is not possible because you need to recursively construct the nodes (how else would you get a tree...).

ossopite

8 hours ago

I think I'm missing something here. if you have a grammar rule R with children A and B, and a function in your recursive descent parser that corresponds to R, why can R not call the parser functions for A and B, which return AST nodes themselves, and then construct another AST node using the result of those? Where was the visitor pattern required here?

mrkeen

6 hours ago

Me too. No-one's denying that recursion is happening. We're just not sure about it being synonymous with the Visitor Pattern.