[rmshin]

Without too much experience in writing compilers beyond this course, I'd say that the course focuses on grounding your conceptual/intuitive knowledge of how compilers work rather than any serious exposition into modern-day production-grade compilers.

You write the assembler for the course's own hardware architecture called Hack, then a compiler backend that converts a stack-based VM intermediate representation (IR) to assembly, and finally a compiler frontend that does syntax analysis and code generation to translate the book's high-level language Jack to the IR.