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.

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jcranmer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	ebiederm 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The academic literature on register allocation is scary. First is presented a linear time optimal algorithm for graph coloring then it is claimed better can be done by a O(N^2) algorithm that uses a heuristic. I do believe the dragon book got caught with the emperor's new register allocator and the literature hasn't really recovered yet.
	▲	j2kun 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Looks like there is quite a bit of overlap with regards to the optimizing parts between these two courses. I guess it's switching from the dragon book to academic papers that makes it advanced.

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mamcx 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...

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ferguess_k 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 \| parent [-]
		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.)

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vkazanov 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	j2kun 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps polyhedral optimization, tiling, scalar evolution, vectorization... I guess garbage collection is pretty advanced in the syllabus.