Learn Compiler Design Guide Complete Reference

Learn Compiler Design Guide Complete Reference

Computers are a balanced mix of software and hardware. Hardware is just a piece of mechanical device and its functions are being controlled by compatible software. Hardware understands instructions in the form of electronic charge, which is the counterpart of binary language in software programming. Binary language has only two alphabets, 0 and 1. To instruct, the hardware codes must be written in binary format, which is simply a series of 1s and 0s. It would be a difficult and cumbersome task for computer programmers to write such codes, which is why we have compilers to write such codes.

The topics that you will find in this application are as follows: architecture related information, phases of compiler related information, lexical analysis related information, regular expressions related information, finite automata related information, syntax analysis related information, types of parsing related information, top-down parser related information, bottom-up parser related information, error recovery related information, semantic analysis related information, run-time environment related information, symbol table related information , intermediate code generation related information, code generation related information, code optimization related information

Before diving straight into the concepts of compilers, we should understand a few other tools that work closely with compiler

Preprocessor: A preprocessor, generally considered as a part of compiler, is a tool that produces input for compilers. It deals with macro-processing, augmentation; file inclusion, language extension, etc.

Interpreter: An interpreter, like a compiler, translates high-level language into low-level machine language. The difference lies in the way they read the source code or input. A compiler reads the whole source code at once, creates tokens, checks semantics, generates intermediate code, executes the whole program and may involve many passes. In contrast, an interpreter reads a statement from the input, converts it to an intermediate code, executes it, then takes the next statement in sequence. If an error occurs, an interpreter stops execution and reports it. Whereas a compiler reads the whole program even if it encounters several errors

Assembler: An assembler translates assembly language programs into machine code. The output of an assembler is called an object file, which contains a combination of machine instructions as well as the data required to place these instructions in memory

Linker: Linker is a computer program that links and merges various object files together in order to make an executable file. All these files might have been compiled by separate assemblers. The major task of a linker is to search and locate referenced module/routines in a program and to determine the memory location where these codes will be loaded, making the program instruction to have absolute references

Loader: Loader is a part of operating system and is responsible for loading executable files into memory and execute them. It calculates the size of a program (instructions and data) and creates memory space for it. It initializes various registers to initiate execution

Cross-compiler: A compiler that runs on platform (A) and is capable of generating executable code for platform (B) is called a cross-compiler

Source-to-source Compiler: A compiler that takes the source code of one programming language and translates it into the source code of another programming language is called a source-to-source compiler.

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