Hello,

i have basic knowledge of C and bit of Operating system knowledge.

i am planning to write a compiler, but i couldnt find any tutorials or how to write a compiler and all that stuff.

can you anyone point me to online tutorials to design a compiler or open source for small compiler for understand about compilers.

Thanks
dayalan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler is a good start.

In a nutshell, you want a lexical analyser, a syntax analyser and a code generator. And of course you need to define the grammar of the language you intend to compile. You can get a lot more sophisticated than this, but this is the basic structure of most simple compilers.

If this is a learning exercise, I'd consider compiling into your own interpreted byte code or into assember text (or even to C text) as binary code generation can be quite complex compared to the other stages.

HTH,
-nick

I am not a programmer, but....If you have not done a lot of application and system programming, I would not think that designing a compiler would be a good place to start. This said, the first thing I would do is buy a book on compiler design. A search at Amazon or O'Reilly should turn up something.

WHY do you want to write your own compiler?

I've got several good books about compilers; I'll post the list when I get home today. But a few things to consider are:

(1) Language design - what language are you implementing? How will it work?
(2) Compiler target - are you writing for a virtual or native machine?

As for language design, that's syntax and semantics. Take a look at existing language design books, as well as existing programming languages, for some ideas.

Targeting a virtual machine is usually easier than compiling to native code, as long as you're using an existing VM implementation like the JVM, CLR, or Parrot. Or you could write a VM spec, then write the VM and a compiler to bytecode at the sametime.

Great book: http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Prin...8500473&sr=8-1
It is sometimes called the Dragon Book.

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Hi Nick,

thank you for the sugesstions, can you please point to me for open source simple compilers code so that i can understand bit more about parser because i feel parser is bit difficult to understand.

Thanks
dayalan

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Hi pixellany,

i am interested to lean and write small compilers to understand how high-level language is converted into low level (Machine Level) code.

if you can please let me know some small compilers open source.

Thanks
dayalan

I'll mail you some simple source if let me know a suitable email address (I'm nick.battle@gmail.com).

The book that I used to learn some of C had us write a emulator for a simple computer and create simple syntax to write programs with it. It then moved onto writing a simple language and a compiler for it to translate it into the sudo machine code that you come up with in the first section. So its not unheard of to write a very simple compiler for educative reasons.

However this was very basic and only could compile the sudo code writing a compiler to compile C code or something Like that would be difficult without knowledge in asm.

For a quick start, look at man yacc and the items referenced from there. (yacc is Yet Another Compiler Compiler.)

It's been a while since I needed to use yacc, but I think you can find examples of simple projects using it fairly easily. Now that I think about it, yacc may, itself, be a program created by yacc. So its description (in the yacc input language) may be a good example.

Here's a list:

• Crafting a Compiler with C
• Engineering a Compiler
• Advanced Compiler Design & Implementation
• Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice
• Compiling with Continuations
• Compilers (The Dragon Book)

Plus the series by Andrew Appel: Modern Compiler Implementation in G, where G ∊ {C, Java, ML}.