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Advanced Compilers: The Self-Guided Online Course

154 points by ibobev 7 hours ago | 16 comments

titzer 3 hours ago

The section on dynamic compilers is more or less all about trace compilation. Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly. The more important concepts here are type feedback and speculation and deoptimization, as well as making fast compilers and tiering.

The course overall looks good, and it's great that so much is available online, so well done, Adrian.

samps 3 hours ago

Thanks, Ben. I admit I mostly think tracing is just a mind-expanding concept to learn about, even if history has proven it’s not very practical as an organizing principle. But as you say, I’d love to offer more context on “what actually seems to work” industrially.

titzer 3 hours ago

Yeah, it is conceptually interesting. I like giving students perspective and in 770 (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wasm/cs17-770/fall2025/) I might spend half or less of a lecture on tracing and I don't pull punches on how I think it ends up not really working well in real systems. It's a good opportunity to talk about program behavior and the cost/benefit of speculation.

We spend a lot more time on type feedback, ICs, and deoptimization which are the more universal concepts that can be applied to multiple different compiler designs.

jlebar 2 hours ago

> Generally, trace compilation is a dead end and has been abandoned repeatedly.

JAX is a tracing compiler!

(I know, I know, it sits in an extremely different part of the problem space than TraceMonkey or LuaJIT. Still.)

zipy124 21 minutes ago

and PyPy right?

jcranmer 2 hours ago

The TraceMonkey paper was on my qual reading list, and my quals happened to be around the time TraceMonkey was ripped out of SpiderMonkey. I was talking with one of the developers at the time (I think it was Jason Orendorff?), who said that tracing just doesn't work out, but there was limited circumstances where he thought it might work out... but I've completely forgotten what those circumstances were.

giancarlostoro 3 hours ago

Got any other recommended resources on building compilers?

abecedarius 2 hours ago

Has LuaJIT been superseded?

j2kun 3 hours ago

I'm a bit confused about what makes this course "advanced." Most of the topics (dead code elimination, data flow, dominator analysis, SSA form) seem like they belong in a first course on compilers.

jcranmer 3 hours ago

Well, course numbers are regular enough that you can look up what the "intro compilers" course is: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4120/2026sp/?schedule

The short answer is that compilers is basically broken up into two courses, with the first course largely being the minimum necessary to build a compiler (lexing, parsing, codegen, register allocation), and the second course being how to build an optimizing compiler.

mamcx 2 hours ago

I have read TONS of material about it*, and none of that is part of the majority of that!

In fact, the "backend" be compiler or interpreter is nearly always left as "exercise to reader".

You can't imagine how much is left to be discovered, from how make a closure, track environment, do pattern matching, memory representation, etc.

EVERYTHING interesting is something you need to look for.

P.D: This only one of the years:https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mamcx/e1743571b9a1ea163a7...

vkazanov 22 minutes ago

What is advanced then? Good coverage of dce, data flow, ssa, intruction selection and reg alloc is actually like 98% of the backend.

ferguess_k 3 hours ago

I think a lot of the non-professionals start with parsing and do not get exposed to backend. I have read two books about interpreters/compilers and they don't touch the backend very much.

Maybe this is introductory for backend?

DonaldPShimoda 3 hours ago

That's part of it. I think another part is that it seems like the students are asked to read the papers behind a lot of the concepts, and academic literature is not generally very accessible to undergrads. (Not that they can't read it, but without someone guiding you through at least the first few papers, it can be a frustrating experience for many.)

GL26 2 hours ago

Saw a podcast that talked about the rust compiler, which apparently included machine learning algorithms at some points to determine whether or not you had code that could crash your system

gaze 2 hours ago

I'm super curious what alexia massalin is up to these days, besides collecting microunity patent royalties