[PaulHoule]

They are still teaching undergrads how to make compilers that give incomprehensible error messages, etc. Compiler technology has the possibility of making a dent in the essential difficulty of getting computers to solve problem and the compiler class is not oriented towards those needs.

There's nothing exciting about coding up a toy version of "Pascal" but it would be exciting if you could add the "unless" construction from Perl to Java in <1000 lines of code.

We are just now coming out of a dark ages in compilers that was brought on by gcc.

Before gcc you could make a living writing compilers (i.e. Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Prolog, ...) at a moderately sized company. Today you have gcc and you have compilers from the likes of Intel and Microsoft.

LLVM breathed some life into gcc since it is now modularized so that you can do interesting things on top of gcc.