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Production compilers for programming languages face multiple requirements. They should be correct, as we rely on them to produce code. They should be fast, in order to provide a good developer experience. They should also be easy to maintain and evolve. Th ...
Metaprogramming is a technique that consists in writing programs that treat other programs as data. This paradigm of software development contributes to a multitude of approaches that improve programmer productivity, including code generation, program anal ...
It has been said that all problems in computer science can be solved by adding another level of indirection, except for performance problems, which are solved by removing levels of indirection. Compilers are our tools for removing levels of indirection aut ...
High level data structures are a cornerstone of modern programming and at the same time stand in the way of compiler optimizations. In order to reason about user or library-defined data structures, compilers need to be extensible. Common mechanisms to exte ...
The trade-offs between the use of modern high-level and low-level programming languages in constructing complex software artifacts are well known. High-level languages allow for greater programmer productivity: abstraction and genericity allow for the same ...
The Scala compiler uses ASTs (abstract syntax trees) as an intermediate representation before generating bytecode. With the development of Scala macros which expand trees at compile time, being able to access, modify and recompose ASTs within the compilati ...
High-level languages allow programmers to express data structures and algorithms that abstract over the type of data they handle. This improves code reuse and makes it possible to develop general-purpose libraries. Yet, data abstractions slow down program ...
Parser combinators provide an elegant way of writing parsers: parser implementations closely follow the structure of the underlying grammar, while accommodating interleaved host language code for data processing. However, the host language features used fo ...
Just-in-time (JIT) compilation of running programs provides more optimization opportunities than offline compilation. Modern JIT compilers, such as those in virtual machines like Oracle's HotSpot for Java or Google's V8 for JavaScript, rely on dynamic prof ...
Developers rely on automated testing and verification tools to gain confidence in their software. The input to such tools is often generated by compilers that have been designed to generate code that runs fast, not code that can be verified easily and quic ...