Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch 283836

Compilers are at the heart of everything programmers do, yet even experienced developers find them intimidating. For those eager to truly grasp how compilers work, Writing a C Compiler dispels the mystery. This book guides you through a fun and engaging project where you’ll learn what it takes to compile a real-world programming language to actual assembly code.

Writing a C Compiler will take you step by step through the process of building your own compiler for a significant subset of C—no prior experience with compiler construction or assembly code needed. Once you’ve built a working compiler for the simplest C program, you’ll add new features chapter by chapter. The algorithms in the book are all in pseudocode, so you can implement your compiler in whatever language you like. Along the way, you’ll explore key concepts like:

Compilers aren’t terrifying beasts—and with help from this hands-on, accessible guide, you might even turn them into your friends for life.

Table of contents 

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: A Minimal Compiler

Chapter 2: Unary Operators

Chapter 3: Binary Operators

Chapter 4: Logical and Relational Operators

Chapter 5: Local Variables

Chapter 6: If Statements and Conditional Expressions

Chapter 7: Compound Statements

Chapter 8: Loops

Chapter 9: Functions

Chapter 10: File-scope Variables and Storage-class

Specifiers

Chapter 11: Long Integers

Chapter 12: Unsigned Integers

Chapter 13: Floating-Point Numbers

Chapter 14: Pointers

Chapter 15: Arrays and Pointer Arithmetic

Chapter 16: Characters and Strings

Chapter 17: Supporting Dynamic Memory Allocation

Chapter 18: Structures

Chapter 19: Optimizing Tacky Programs

Chapter 20: Register Allocation

Next Steps

Appendix A: Debugging Assembly Code with GDB or LLDB

Appendix B: Assembly Generation and Code Emission Tables

References