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 (2024 version):
Document(Spring 2021: future semesters may differ).
- Document
Old exams from previous semesters:
Spring 2014 Practice Midterm Solutions Spring 2014 Practice Final Solutions Spring 2014 Midterm Exam Spring 2015 Midterm Exam Spring 2016 Midterm Exam Spring 2017 Midterm Exam Spring 2018 Midterm Exam
Lectures
This is what I expect for a schedule, but (except for exam dates) is subject to change:
| Tuesday Lecture | Thursday Lecture |
| Jan 9: (no class: Winter Break) | Jan 11: Intro/SML |
| Jan 16: Regexps | Jan 18: Lexers |
| Jan 23: LL Parsing | Jan 25: LR Parsing |
| Jan 30: LR Parsing/ML-yacc | Feb 1: ASTs, Symbol tables |
| Feb 6: Static Analysis | Feb 8: Static Analysis |
| Feb 13: Sub-typing | Feb 15: Polymorphic type inference |
| Feb 20: Stacks & Procedure Linkage | Feb 22: AST to IR |
| Feb 27:AST to IR | Feb 29: Catchup/Review/etc |
| Mar 5: Midterm Exam | Mar 3: (no class) |
| (spring break) | (spring break) |
| Mar 19: Basic Blocks/Canonicalization | Mar 21: Instruction Selection |
| Mar 26: Data flow, liveness | March 28: Register Allocation |
| April 2: Register Allocation (cont'd) | April 4: Dataflow Revisited |
| April 9: Dataflow (cont'd)/Loops | April 11: Garbage Collection |
April 16: Catchup, Review, or Compiler Hacking Day
| April 18: Office hours during class time (grad classes have ended) |