Posted by SteveHawk27 12 hours ago
If you like polyglot files, see https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
I believe it’s a dual use tool, hence a polyglot.
It claims clang is NOT "a pipeline that runs each pass of the compiler over your entire code before shuffling its output along to the next pass."
What I think the author is talking about is primarily AST parsing and clangd, where as "any compiler tome" is still highly relevant to the actual work of building a compiler.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317
https://lobste.rs/s/dwf2yn/sixten_s_query_based_compiler
https://ericlippert.com/2012/06/08/red-green-trees/
Rust's salsa, etc.
Related search terms are incremental compilation and red-green trees. It's primarily an ide driven workflow (well, the original use case was driven by ides), but the principles behind it are very interesting.
You can grok the difference by thinking through, for example, the difference between invoking `g++` on the command line - include all headers, then compile object files via includes, re-do all template deduction, etc. and one where editing a single line in a single file doesn't change the entire data structure much and force entire recompilation (this doesn't need full ownership of editing either by hooking UI events or keylogging: have a directory watcher treat the file diff as a patch, and then send it to the server in patch form; the observation being that compiling an O(n) size file is often way more expensive than a program that goes through the entire file a few times and generates a patch)
AST's are similar to these kinds of trees only insofar as the underlying data structure to understand programming languages are syntax trees.
I've always wanted to get into this stuff but it's hard!
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge scientific journal — rather than that, we publish even the smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and find it fun/interesting to learn.
The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the list ;)
P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)