A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation

First of all, this book is not for starters in the area of compiler design. Starters in the area of compiler design who are looking for a 'cookbook', I recommend to read 'Programming Language Processors in Java: Compilers and Interpreters' by David Watt. Why do I like this book? Because it is a cookbook for a 'full blown' C Compiler in C itself. Well actually it's a compiler for a subset of C, but it is still very comprehensive! It offers a lot of code snippets which are really well commented about what/where/how. A disadvantage of this book is that it doesn't cover advanced topics such as code optimizations. This is the area where the action is right now. All other parts (scanning/parsing/etc) can be bought of the shelf. But it remain a very nice text, to give you an valuable insight in how a compiler could be implemented.

This book is definitely _not_ for beginners, but compilers are not supposed to be written by novices -- if there is rocket science in computers, it is compiler development. Crystal clear style and language make this book easy reading, and LCC is the best non-optimizing compiler I've seen (and believe me, I've seen many compiler sources): orthogonal, easy to follow design, well-thought data structures and overall architecture.I treat this book as a perfect collection of brilliant ideas, many of which you will find implemented in most commercial compilers.Whether it helps to write your own compiler? -- sure. Are you thinking about IR (internal representation) that will be easy to create and, most important, walk through and manipulate? -- take a look how Fraser et al did it; they did it well. Think how to write a front end or code generator? -- it's all there. Sure, blind copying won't work -- optimizing compiler will call for way more sophisticated BURG-like technique (one of the best known code generation techniques by now), but, all in all, it'll be BURG-like, and it's in the book as well.So, if you want to show your students (or learn yourself) how compilers should be written, you cannot find anything better than LCC accompanied by this book. Fraser's team did it right.

I first read this book when I ported lcc 3.5 to the Alpha (and later helped tune the production 4.0 port). The book is extremely clear and complete with regard to the lcc compiler itself; it is an invaluable reference for anyone who works with lcc. In the two years since I last worked directly with lcc, I've consulted the book on numerous occasions; Messrs. Fraser and Hanson have a clear writing and programming style that makes this book (and the awesome paper that they wrote with Todd Proebsting on lburg) one of my standard "how-to" books on simple IR and code generation issues. I'd only like to see more information about lburg; in particular, more about using lburg to do some simple optimizations. The writing style is clear and reasonably concise, but the constraints of retrofitting literate programming techniques onto an existing software project can make the code presentation a little fragmented. Still, I always found what I wanted and usually found the explanation to be quite good.