| Great post! If you're a PL/compiler/GC hacker, then here are wheels you should reinvent in order to even just have a basic idea of WTF is going on in the Big Serious Production Wheels that you might end up being gainfully employed to maintain: - Invent your own language, and write at least an interpreter for it, to get a feel for what makes a language work at all, or not. - Invent your own compiler IR. Don't worry if you make a bunch of mistakes. Don't worry about whether you follow my advice for how to do it, or anyone else's advice. Make it your own and learn from your mistakes. - Invent your own way of doing the major compiler optimizations. Of course there are established ways of doing SSA conversion, CSE, constant prop, regalloc, instruction selection, etc. But you won't know why they are that way unless you try to make your own, and then either succeed because you are smarter than everyone else (it's possible that you are), or succeed because you literally reinvented the wheel (then you understand the compiler's wheels better than your friends because you got there from first principles), or you'll fail (most likely outcome) but then you'll understand why the real wheels work the way that they do better than others. - Reinvent memory management. Write your own GC or whatever. That's how I learned the craft. Can't think of a better way to learn. |