| There are actually quite a few changes! The most obvious change you'll see is the use of SSA, which has become the dominant representation in IR starting 25-30 years ago. There's also been an increase in the importance of compiler IRs, and especially the concept of code passing through multiple IRs before reaching machine code. Formal semantics has become more of a thing in the past decade or so. It's now routine that even weak memory models have a detailed formal model of how they work. In LLVM, it's now a requirement that you demonstrate formal correctness of new InstCombine transformations (which are essentially peephole optimizations). The use of parser generators has really fallen into disrepute; everything has transitioned to handrolled parsers these days. Language standards themselves are starting to rely on context-sensitive keywords, which are hard to implement in a generator-based lexer/parser setup. Optimizations have generally broadened in scope; we're now seeing whole-function level of optimization being the default way to look at stuff for analysis, and there's been a variety of techniques introduced to make whole-program optimization (aka LTO) much more tractable. Another subtle but major shift is that compilers are increasingly reliant on inferred analysis from dumber representations over the original declared intent of the code. For example, SROA in LLVM (which breaks up structs so that individual fields can be independently allocated in registers) relies not on looking at the way the struct is declared but the offsets within the struct that various load and store operations use. A final major shift is the trend towards support for ancillary tooling in the programming language space, so that the compiler isn't merely a tool that goes from source to object code, but is something that can be actively queried for information about the source code. Things like the language server, or smart formatting, or automatic refactoring tooling. |