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by silentOpen 5769 days ago
Do you want to build a compiler or design a programming language? The Dragon Book is pretty heavy on implementation details if you just want a taste without building one.

If you're just getting started in mechanical program transformation, I strongly recommend using something like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and its meta-circular evaluator to get the basics without the grunge of parsing and generation.
1 comments
dlo 5769 days ago
It is possible to skip the first half of the Dragon Book if you are not interested in front-end stuff. (I am not.) Chapters 8 and onward are far more interesting IMO. You will encounters topics such as SSA, data-flow analysis, points-to analysis, binary-decision diagrams, call graphs, Datalog, etc.
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pbiggar 5768 days ago
Meh. It's SSA treatment is poor. The dataflow chapter is OK. The points-to chapter isn't great (especially for someone so into it). BDDs and datalog are very poorly addressed, especially when trying to seek more information of Lam/Whaley's work on them.

Skip the whole Dragon Book, read Cooper/Torczon or Appel.

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dlo 5768 days ago
I agree that its treatment of SSA is scanty. Muchnick, which I have started poking at, is much more thorough: The Dragon Book does go into what SSA is, but it does not tell you how to compute it while Muchnick does. However, I imagine it must have been a deliberate decision since Ullman et al. go into dominance frontiers quite readily shortly thereafter.

I admit that I skipped over the book's treatment of points-to analysis since I read the original papers by Lam and Whaley on it. Obviously, I can't speak for its treatment in the book, but I found the papers to be excellent. And indeed, one of them won a Best Paper award.

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