ECE 553: Compiler Construction

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

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