At AdGear, the developers typically end their week at “Friday Not Friday”, a team activity from 4pm to 5pm. One person gives a presentation on any technical subject while the others listen and sip a beer to wind down before the week-end.

Last week, I gave a demonstration that I called “Speedrunning a Compiler”. I wanted to show my colleagues the basics of writing a compiler, and I thought it would be more instructive if they saw code rather than an abstract flowchart. Thus, I wrote a compiler for a very small language that I call “Minilang”. We went over the classic phases of a compiler: scanner, parser, typechecker, and code generator. I used Python as my implementation language; the code I wrote was not pretty and abused Python’s flexibility (mutation galore, dynamic typing, using strings and dicts instead of objects) and I generated MIPS assembly.

The resulting program is available on Github: https://github.com/gnuvince/fnf-vfoley/blob/master/compiler/compiler.py

I wrote the scanner and parser by hand partly because Minilang is simple enough, but mostly because I wanted the process of transforming text into an AST to not be mysterious and hidden behind tools like flex and bison (or an equivalent in Python, like PLY). Similarly, rather than generating C or JavaScript code, I used assembly because it seems more “real”: had I generated C, the question of how the code becomes executable would’ve been hidden by gcc or clang. Generating assembly code makes the mapping between high-level concepts and low-level constructs more explicit. Also, by generating very naïve assembly—I basically implemented a stack machine—I could show patterns of code that a simple peephole optimizer should recognize and replace.

Thanks to a couple practice runs during the week and some copy-pasting from my completed example, I was able to finish in about 50 minutes and hopefully to enlighten my colleagues a little bit.