The definition of "passable compiler" in 1992 must have been very different from what it is today; while third year students write interpreters and compilers, nobody would call them useful or passable.

▲

Sharlin an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Languages were simpler (except for certain ones, like C++ which was a beast even in 1992), and incredibly complex and magical optimizers weren’t yet a thing, never mind a feature expected of a "passable" compiler. One could still write a reasonable non-optimizing Pascal or C89 compiler in a weekend more or less, and it would be both faster to write (thanks to more expressive languages) and faster at compiling (thanks to itself being compiled by an optimizing compiler) than in 1992!

	▲	dTal 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I dunno, Chez Scheme is from 1985 and remains today one of the most magically optimizing compilers for a dynamic language in existence... kind of makes you wonder how we went so far wrong with Python.

▲

BigTTYGothGF 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The definition of "passable compiler" in 1992 must have been very different from what it is today;

It was.