This class is aimed at graduate students, seniors, and ambitious juniors who are strong/competent programmers. The pre-requisite for this course for undergraduates is CS/ECE 250 (or CS 104 or ECE 152 under the old numbering scheme). Graduate students should have a comparable background—they should be comfortable with programming, data structures, and MIPS assembly. Graduate students who lack such a background should certainly have complete mastery over the material in ECE 550 and/or ECE 551, with 650 and 651 strongly recommended.
I will assume you are a completely capable programmer at the start of this course.
This course is significant work: you will write a compiler from start to finish. For students who are adequately prepared for this course, this is an exciting, fulfilling, and fun experience. For students who are not prepared, this is not the course to learn to program in.
Course Resources
- The course syllabus (Spring 2021: future semesters may differ).
- SML intro and warmup exercises
- We will be using Piazza for class discussions/questions etc. I will also post various announcements, assignment corrections/clarifications, and so forth here.
- Old exams from previous semesters:
Lectures
This is what I expect for a schedule, but (except for exam dates) is subject to change:
| Tuesday Lecture | Thursday Lecture |
| Jan 4: (no class: Winter Break) | Jan 6: Intro/SML |
| Jan 11: Regexps | Jan 13: Lexers |
| Jan 18: LL Parsing | Jan 20: LR Parsing |
| Jan 25: LR Parsing/ML-yacc | Jan 27: ASTs, Symbol tables |
| Feb 1: Static Analysis | Feb 3: Static Analysis |
| Feb 8: Sub-typing | Feb 10: Polymorphic type inference |
| Feb 15: Stacks & Procedure Linkage | Feb 17: AST to IR |
| Feb 22:AST to IR | Feb 24: Catchup/Review/etc |
| Mar 1: Midterm Exam | Mar 3: Basic Blocks/Canonicalization |
| (spring break) | (spring break) |
| Mar 15: Instruction Selection | Mar 17: Data flow, liveness |
| Mar 22:Register Allocation | March 24: Register Allocation (cont'd) |
| March 29: Dataflow Revisited | March 31: Dataflow (cont'd) |
| April 5: Loops | April 7: Garbage Collection |
| April 12: Catchup, Review, or Compiler Hacking Day | April 14: Compiler Hacking Day |