CC: Compiler Construction
| Course: | 21025 Compiler Construction (Spring 2019) |
| Lecturer: | Prof. Oscar Nierstrasz, Dr. Mohammad Ghafari |
| Assistants: | Manuel Leuenberger, Rathesan (Radi) Iyadurai |
| Audience: | Master students in computer science |
| Lecture: | Fridays, 10h15 - 12h00 |
| Exercises: | Fridays, 12h00 - 12h45 |
| Place: | Engehaldenstrasse 8, 001 |
| Start: | Feb 22, 2019 |
| Repetition: | NA |
Summary
This course will provide students with an introduction to modern compiler construction. The first two-thirds of the course will cover fundamental topics, and will be based on the text book Modern Compiler Implementation in Java (Second edition), Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA, 2002, by Andrew W. Appel, with Jens Palsberg). The remaining third of the course covers advanced topics of current interest.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Distinguish formal and practical properties of different approaches to parsing
- Understand and implement various techniques to parse source code
- Implement a basic compiler
- Use visitors to process an abstract syntax tree (AST)
- Transform an AST to intermediate representation (IR)
- Perform peephole optimization on the IR
- Generate target code (eg Java bytecode) from IR
Grading
The final grade will be based 10% on exercises, 30% on a team project and 60% on the final exam.
Schedule 2019
| Week | Date | Lecture | Exercises |
| 1 | 22-Feb-19 | Introduction | Assignment 1 |
| 2 | 01-Mar-19 | Lexical Analysis | Assignment 2 |
| 3 | 08-Mar-19 | Parsing | Assignment 3 |
| 4 | 15-Mar-19 | Parsing in Practice | Project 1 ZIP |
| 5 | 22-Mar-19 | Intermediate Representation | |
| 6 | 29-Mar-19 | Optimization | Project 2 ZIP |
| 7 | 05-Apr-19 | Code Generation | |
| 8 | 12-Apr-19 | Bytecode and Virtual Machines | Project 3 ZIP |
| - | 19-Apr-19 | Good Friday | |
| - | 26-Apr-19 | Spring break | |
| 9 | 03-May-19 | PEGs, Packrats and Parser Combinators (Jan Kurš) | |
| 10 | 10-May-19 | Truffle — a language implementation framework (Boris Spasojević) | |
| 11 | 17-May-19 | Program Transformation | |
| 12 | 24-May-19 | Compiling R — a case study (Olivier Flückiger) | |
| 13 | 31-May-19 | Final Exam |
NB: The lecture notes are based partly on similar courses offered by Profs. Jens Palsberg (CS132) and Tony Hosking (CS502).
This course was last taught in the Spring of 2019. The course materials have been archived on github.
Resources
- Piazza Forum
- Annotated PDF lecture notes
- tools (JavaCC, JTB, BCEL)
- examples (github repo)
- Podcast
- CC Resources
- Semantic Analysis (unibe access only)
- supplementary reading
- mirrored PDFs (unibe access only)
- Exam 2017
- Design Patterns (unibe only)
- Course Evaluations: FS11, FS15, FS17, FS19
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Source materials are available on github.