Compilers

Spring 2026

Documents

• Syllabus and Schedule - revised January 24, 2026
• History and Advice
• About Laptops and Phones in Class
• Course Policies
• General Academic Calendar
• Academic Honesty
• School of Computer Science and Mathematics Department of Computing Technology Goals
• Writing Center
• Counseling Services
• Title IX at Marist
• Title IX Student Bill of Rights and IX Reporting Options
• Academic Learning Center for tutoring and more

Books

• Crafting a Compiler (optional)
• The Famous Dragon Book (optional)
  Two of the authors are ACM Turing Award winners.
• Compiler Construction by Niklaus Wirth
• Language Implementation Patterns by Terence Parr
• The Definitive ANTLR4 Reference by Terence Parr
• Basics of Compiler Design by Torben Mogensen
• Introduction to Compilers and Language Design by Douglas Thain
• GNU Compiler Collection Internals

Project and Labs

• The labs feed into the first part of your semester project and inform all of our exams. Get started by looking at Our Language Grammar. It would be cool to write your labs in Markdown.

• • Lab 1: Making tokens with your Lexer
  • Lab 2: More token making, now with Finite Automata
  • Lab 3: Turning tokens into sentences with your Parser
  • Lab 4: Analyzing Grammars
  • Lab 5: Building Syntax Trees both Concrete and Abstract
  • Lab 5: Building Syntax Trees both Concrete and Abstract
  • Lab 6: Symbol tables and you (and your compiler)
  • Lab 7: Semantic Analysis: Checking scope and type
  • Lab 8: Generating Code
  • Lab 9: Manipulating Grammars
• Semester Project, part one - A full compiler with 6502a code generation
  • Befoer you begin, have a look at some build environment notes.
  • Here are some Operating Systems on which to test your generated code:
    • CyberCore by Kevin Mirsky
    • SvegOS by Justin Svegliato.
    • MysteriOS Bloop by Rebecca Murphy
    • ctOS by Anthony Barranco
    • ChronOS.LL in OmniChron by Chris Cordisco
  • Here is the 6502a Instruction Set for your project.
• Semester Project, part two - Optimizations, code rewriting, and more code generations

Examples

• Try Template Project 0 in JavaScript And here it is on GitHub.
• Template Project 0 in TypeScript on GitHub - for early versions of TypeScript
• AlanC, a simple lexer via JavaCC (ZIP file)
• A simple example in modern TypeScript (ZIP file) - for recent (as of 2023) versions of TypeScript
• A simple example in C++ (ZIP file)

Notes

• Introduction to Compilers and Before and After Compilation
• Lexical Analysis and Lex without spaces
• Parsing
• Semantic Analysis
• Type Systems
• Code Generation
  • Simple code generation example one
  • Simple code generation example two
• Ambiguous Grammars
• More Grammar Stuff
• Shift-Reduce Parse examples from MIT

Resources

• LaTeX
• Comprehensive TEX Archive Network
• Overleaf (formerly ShareLaTeX)
• LaTeX Tutorial from Overleaf
• TeX Stack Exchange
• TikZ package tutorial (for drawing DFAs and NFAs)
• Apple's Swift compiler
• Swift Source Code
• See the AST with -dump-ast option
• TypeScript
• Welcome to TypeScript
• The TypeScript Handbook
• Typescript in 5 Minutes
• The TypeScript tag at Stack Overflow
• Static code analyzer for TypeScript from SonarSource
• Videos of Anders Hejlsberg on TypeScript:
  • at BUILD 2014
  • Inside TypeScript from BUILD 2012
  • The Typescript Compiler Explained
• JavaScript
• JavaScript is Good, Actually - Well... modern JavaScript is.
• A Re-introduction to JavaScript
• JavaScript Style Guides
• The jQuery JavaScript Style Guide
• Some JavaScript code conventions - from Doug Crockford
• More JavaScript code conventions - from many people, managed via Git
• JavaScript: The Good Parts - by Doug Crockford
• The JavaScript tag at Stack Overflow
• The JavaScript tag at Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange
• JavaScript Keyboard Events Madness
• Treant.js - a JavaScipt library for tree diagram visualizations
• Write Tetris in JavaScript
• Git
• GitHub Desktop
• A Gentle Introduction to Git and GitHub from Alan
• Git from the Bottom up by John Wiegley
• Git Basics
• Try Github
• GitHub Guides
• Advanced: Git From the Inside Out
• Visualizing Git Concepts
• How to Write a Git Commit Message - pretty good advice
• The Issues Feature on GitHub
• Dangers of GitHub and Amazon
• Java
• IntelliJ IDEA
• Virual Studio Code
• NetBeans
• Eclipse
• Debugging Java in IntelliJ IDEA
• Debugging Java in Visual Studio Code
• Sun's Oracle's Java Documentation
• Oracle's "New to Java Programming" Center
• Java tutorials
• Java Coffee Break - Getting started
• The Java tag at Stack Overflow
• Memory usage in Java
• JVM Anatomy Quarks
• JVM Internals
• A JVM Does That? by Cliff Click
• Jasmin, Jasper, and JavaCC
• Jasmin at SourceForge
• Jasper
• JavaCC
• LLVM
• LLVM - Compiler Infrastructure
• LLVM for Students
• Mapping High-Level Constructs to LLVM IR
• LLVM Code Generation in HHVM
• A Tourist's Guide to the LLVM Source Code
• The C# Burst Compiler using LLVM
• Compiler Performance and LLVM
• C++
• C++ PLDB Entry
• GCC
• CLion
• Qt
• g++ cheatsheet from USC
• makefile cheatsheet from USC
• Boost Libraries
• Abseil - C++ docs and libraries from Google
• Super helpful resource on Templates in C++
• 6502 Assembly Language
• Instruction Set for Our Projects
• How To Write 6502 Assembly Language from Easy 6502
• Why the 6502? Because The 6502 CPU Powered a Whole Generation! from The 8-Bit Guy
• Visual 6502
• Virtual 6502 assembler and disassembler
• In-depth 6502 Op Code Analysis (With "illegal" op codes too.)
• 6502 / 6510 / 8502 Opcode List, with details - from Nybbles and Bytes
• 6502 Circuit Diagram
• Commodore History Part One - The PET - video from from The 8-Bit Guy
• From BitSavers' Software Archive:
  • MOS 6500 Data Sheets from 1976
  • MOS 6500 Op Codes
  • MOS 6500 Architecture
• From AtariArchives:
  • Machine Language For Beginners
  • The Second Book Of Machine Language
  • Assembly Language Programming for the Atari Computers
• T-800 Heads-up Display from The Terminator, 1984
• Learn 6502 Assembly Language by hacking Mario World
• Software Development
• Software Engineering at Google a book by Abseil
• Ideas about Software Development - 6 years later
• Software Development Developments at Microsoft
• Exploding Software Engineering Myths - more from Microsoft Research
• A Microsoft Code Review - with Marist alum Jon Miller
• A big list of naughty strings - Great for testing
• Comments on Comments
• Great books about writing software
  • Code Complete by Steve McConnell
  • Beautiful Code by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
  • Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
• Algorithms
• Algorithm Visualizations - VisuAlgo, from Dr. Steven Halim and some of his students from the National University of Singapore
• Visualizing Algorithms by Mike Bostock, creator of d3
• Sorting Algorithm Animations - Visual demos by David R. Martin
• The Sound of Sorting - Sorting Algorithm Audibilization and Visualization, by Timo Bingmann
• Data Structure Visualization Tool from David Galles
• Alan's Algorithms Course
• Others
• DebugEx - a Regular Expression tester
• Anders Hejlsberg on Modern Compiler Construction - January 2017
• Compiler Jobs
• Compiler writing resources on Stack Overflow
• Resources for Amateur Compiler Writers
• Emscripten - an LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler
• Grammatica - a C# Compiler Compiler
• ANTLR
• ANTLR Mega-Tutorial by Federico Tomassetti
• Graal Multi-Language VM
• Ragel a state machine compiler
• Compiler Explorer - Type source code and see the machine language
• Command Line Interface Guidelines

Articles

• A simple Garbage Collector - by Bob Nystrom
• Visualizing Garbage Collection algorithms
• A peak into the Erlang compiler and BEAM bytecode
• Dijkstra on Recursive Programming from 1960
• A walk through building an interpreter
• OMeta attribute grammar example
• Inside the JVM Interactive Illustrations
• Build a compiler ("How about Minsk?") in C# by Immo Landwerth
• How Tail Call Optimization Works by Evan Klitzke
• A podcast episode about writing BNF
• A Peek Inside the Erlang Compiler from 2012
• A Timeline of Parsing
• On Language and Humanity: In Conversation With Noam Chomsky
• The EDSAC turned 70 in 2019 - Early computing from Cambridge and here's an even earlier (1951) film about it
• A Primer on Type Systems by Glenn G. Chappell
• Graph of Programming Languages connected by Compilers
• Compiler Explorer from Matt Godbolt
• How Clang Compiles a Function by John Regehr
• IR and Assembly Which is better?
• Facebook Infer - a static analysis tool
• The .NET Compiler Platform
• Secrets of Swift's Speed Thoughts on Apple's Swift language and compiler optimizations
• Apple, JavaScript, and the LLVM Compiler
• So You Want To Write Your Own Language? by Walter Bright, designer of the D programming language
• JavaScript JIT Compiler Optimizations
• Why ML is good for writing compilers
• Microsoft Research Common Compiler Infrastructure
• Anders Hejlsberg on LINQ and Functional Programming
• C Recursion - by Kernighan, Ritchie, and Lovecraft
• Comments on Comments
• Old Compiler Writing Advice - Two papers: This one and that one.
• Type Checking in Groovy
• Thoughts about Type Safety from the Programming Language Enthusiast blog
• Building a modern functional compiler from first principles in Haskell
• A History of Branch Prediction

• Compiler Fuzzing
• Compiler Fuzzing, part one
• Grammarinator an ANTLRv4 grammar-based test generator
• Compiler Fuzzing through Deep Learning
• Fuzzing in general

• Software Engineering Radio
  The podcast for professional developers
  I really like these folks. Highly recommended. Here are a few episodes to get you started:
  Compiler Construction
  • Interview with Anders Hejlsberg - Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#
  • Internals of the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC)
  • On Parsers
  • Type Systems
  Concurrency
  • The Singularity Research OS (Software Isolated Processes)
  • Garbage Collection and Transactional Memory
  • Concurrency Part One
  • Concurrency Part Two
  • Concurrency Part Three
  • More on Concurrency
  Languages
  • Joe Armstrong on Erlang
  • Martin Odersky on Scala
  • Martin Ordersky on Scala Update
  • Dick Gabriel on the origins of LISP
  • Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming and Haskell
  • Dynamic Languages for Static Minds

Past Project Hall of Fame

TypeScript and JavaScript projects only. There have been some fantastic projects in Rust, Scala, C++, Java, (and even Python once, but never again), and other languages, but they (obviously) will not execute in a web browser.

• 2025
• ComPIEler by Aidan Carr
• 2024
• Compilatron by Nick Fiore
• 2023
• Compiler by Max English
• 2022
• 6502 Compiler by Gabriel Arnell
• 2021
• Nightingale Compiler (with AxiOS operating system) by Alex Badia
• 2019
• Juice Compiler
• 2018
• Sonar
• Kompailer
• The Colorful Compiler
• Daniel Ahl's Compiler
• Note: Earlier compilers used slightly different grammars compared to our current grammar.
• 2017
• Tienminator
• 2016
• Although some were close, none of the JavaScript or TypeScript projects were worthy of this hall of fame. There were some excellent projects implemented in other languages.
• 2015
• Andrew B
• Bloop Compiler
• 2014
• Svegliator
• Rob W
• ChronOS.LL in OmniChron
• Note: Earlier compilers used significantly different grammars compared to our current grammar.
• 2013
• AnnaC
• ChronOS
• Max L
• Morph6502
• 2010
• harpO
• PGP
• 2009
• Gentlemen
• Team Zero+