MIPS architecture is used in many embedded systems today, including gaming consoles, routers, and other devices. It is a RISC architecture, which makes decoding of the instructions easier, and the number of basic instructions is not that big (in contrast with CISC architecture, used e.g. in x86). This makes MIPS a good learning architecture, and that’s why it’s often used in universities in compiler class for code generation. And as a part of course for implementing a virtual machine for a subset of MIPS instructions, I have built the parser for its assembly.

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Sometimes more code in a source language, can mean less code in a generated language.

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Recently an old playing ES5 bug was raised on Twitter, and as the poll shown, sometimes results can be very fun

Let’s talk about References.

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In this small note we recap concepts of objects relationships in Object-Oriented programming.

Recently Allen Wirfs-Brock raised an interesting topic for distinguishing and abstracting a concept of “an open set of objects that share a common interface and implementation”.

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I’ve been playing with generated (native) code in order to test how compilers (specific or in general) translate a = a + 1 and a++, and found some other interesting optimizations.

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Read this article in English, Chinese.

В этой небольшой заметке мы затронем еще одну тему ES6 — параметры функций со значениями по умолчанию. Как мы увидим, там есть некоторые тонкости.

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Read this article in Chinese, Russian.

In this small note we’ll cover another ES6 feature, function parameters with default values. As we will see there are some subtle cases there.

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In this article we briefly describe the generic topic of pattern matching in programming languages. We’ll see that this powerful technique is present in our every day programming, even if we may not notice it.

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This article describes in some details our interpreter which we have created during the course Essentials of interpretation. We summarize intermediate results and the main parts of the evaluator making notes which were omitted in the code articles.

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“Essentials of interpretation” is a new series which consists of small lessons on interpretation of computer programs. The lessons are implemented in JavaScript and contain detailed comments. The sources can be found on the appropriate GitHub repository.

Available lessons:

• Lesson 1. The simplest arithmetic expressions (AE) evaluator
• Lesson 2. Parsing. Lexer of AE in math infix notation
• Lesson 3. Parsing. Parser of AE in math infix notation
• Lesson 4. Working with environments. Variables and built-in functions
• Lesson 5. Simple user-defined functions
• Lesson 6. Inner functions, lambdas and closures
• Lesson 7. Derived expressions (“Syntactic sugar”)

Notes:

• Note 1. Stack-based evaluation of the simplest AE in the prefix notation
• Note 2. S-expression to AST transformer
• Note 3. Complex data structures: pairs and lists

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