| [Summary: read this paper instead http://scheme2006.cs.uchicago.edu/11-ghuloum.pdf] The article is both acceptable and appreciated, but not good. There are far better, not to mention easier ways to start hacking a compiler quickly than doing it with Flex/Bison/LLVM and in C++. Look at this over engineering: http://gnuu.org/2009/09/18/writing-your-own-toy-compiler/4/ A compiler should be written as a fluid, jelly-like organism; you will be changing it so much and so often, it's a waste of time to introduce any structure like that to it so early. The only place where you need a heavy design is the intermediate representation; and to this extent, you want the most flexible "design", if you can get away with Lisp-like S-expressions, by all means do it. You will be annotating the intermediate representation in multiple phases, so don't hesitate to copy deeply instead of mutating it with surgery. Don't bother with an elaborate symbol table design, just use the cheapest/easiest hash-table you can find. Keep your IR human readable or you will be forced to write binary analysis tools before you even settle on an IR format (horrible chicken and egg problem; and that's what you get when you model your IR with a giant C union .. you know, that trick, don't do it!) For the last 20+ years, Schemers have been losing their voices preaching the trivialization of compiler hacking. Listen to them; Schemers live in a parallel universe to the mainstream compiler community, which still, even if they don't know it, are hard at work improving the first Fortran compiler. Have fun! |