- None at the moment
Course overview
How programming languages work under the hood? What’s the difference between compiler and interpreter? What is a virtual machine, and JIT-compiler? And what about the difference between functional and imperative programming?
There are so many questions when it comes to implementing a programming language!
The problem with “compiler classes” in school is such classes are usually presented as some “hardcore rocket science” which is only for advanced engineers.
Moreover, classic compiler books start from the least significant topic, such as Lexical analysis, going straight down to the theoretical aspects of formal grammars. And by the time of implementing the first Tokenizer module, students simply lose an interest to the topic, not having a chance to actually start implementing a programing language itself. And all this is spread to a whole semester of messing with tokenizers and BNF grammars, without understanding an actual semantics of programming languages.
I believe we should be able to build and understand a full programming language semantics, end-to-end, in 4-6 hours — with a content going straight to the point, showed in live coding sessions as pair-programming and described in a comprehensible way.
In the Programming Language with LLVM class we focus on compiling our language to LLVM IR, and build a lower-level programming language. Working closely with the LLVM compiler infrastructure level you will understand how lower-level compilation and production-level languages, such as C++, Rust, etc work today.
Implementing a programing language would also make your practical level in other programming languages more professional.
