[shoo]

Graydon Hoare's "One-Day Compilers" presentation: http://www.venge.net/graydon/talks/mkc/html/mgp00001.html

  > goal: translate subset of makefile syntax into native executables

  result: pipeline to compile subset of makefile syntax into native executables, in less than 400 lines of code

  > including
  > * lexing and parsing
  > * variable binding
  > * type checking
  > * error reporting
  > * native code generation

  - use custom camlp4 pre processor
  - define Ocaml types and functions to model things found in input makefile (variable, rules, dependencies). leverage Ocaml semantics 
  - parse input simple makefile language
  - map parsed input into AST for Ocaml functions defined earlier
  - use ocaml's quotation machinery to define ocaml AST values from standard ocaml syntax, without building AST values by hand 
  - bundle everything into an ocaml program
  - ocaml program produces single ocaml value that models the input program described by makefile

  - translate ocaml value into C code:
  - generate C code from templated quotations, again using ocaml quotation support, but for C language, not ocaml
  - compile generated C code with gcc

  - glue everything together into one pipeline