COMP 412: Compiler Construction for Undergraduates
Keith Cooper
Michael Burke
Department of Computer Science,   Rice University
Houston, Texas, USA
Fall 2019: HRZ 212 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11:00am

Notes

Summary

Comp 412 provides the student with an overview of the issues that arise in the design and construction of translators for programming languages. The course emphasizes techniques that have direct application to the construction of compilers. However, many of the same concepts find application in the implementation of interpreters.

The course consists of lectures, programming assignments, and exams. A tentative schedule for the programming assignments is given on the programming assignments page.

Quick Links

The course syllabus provides more details, including the basis for grades. It is also available on Piazza and in Esther.

Lecture Notes

We will post PDF-format copies of the slides used in class as they become available. Typically, they will be available several hours before lecture. In previous years, students have found it effective to print the the slides and use them to take notes.

You are responsible for the contents of the lecture notes.

We will also post some material not presented in class that you may find helpful. See the "Additional Materials" section at the bottom of the Lectures page.

Programming Assignments

The class will have three programming assignments, often referred to as "labs". All materials related to the programming exercises will be available exclusively online.

This year, we are changing up the set of programming assignments to reflect our experience over the last three years. We are dropping the LL(1) parser generator and breaking the register allocator into two distinct pieces.

Every year, we ask students what advice they would give to students in future editions of the course. Every year, the predominant piece of advice is to start working on the programming assignments when they are posted. The programming assignments in COMP 412 are designed to take the alloted time. It appears, from experience, that the assignments take roughly the time alloted for them by the instructors.

The philosophy for programming exercises in Comp 412 is simple. Each lab is intended to have a high ratio of thought to programming. Thus, you will build components that might fit into a compiler, rather than building a complete compiler. We have abstracted away much of the routine work and focused the labs on tasks that should give you deeper insight into a specific problem---scanning and parsing, register allocation, or instruction scheduling.

To adjust grades for early and late submissions, each student has a fixed number of "grace" days that we will apply, automatically, to late work. In addition, on each lab there is a hard cutoff for when late work may be submitted. See the discussion in the lab 1 handout for a more detailed explanation.

Questions about the programming assignments (and about the course, in general) should be directed to the Piazza site.
If you have not received an invitation to join the Piazza site, talk with one of the professors after class.

Textbook

We will use the book Engineering a Compiler, Second Edition, by Cooper and Torczon, published by the Morgan-Kaufmann imprint of Elsevier. We have started an Errata site; it will, undoubtedly, grow over time. Copies can be purchased at the Rice Campus bookstore, direct from the publisher, or at your favorite online retailer. If you find errors, please let the authors know.

The authors donate an amount equal to the royalties that would be generated by purchases in Comp 412 to the Torczon fellowship fund at Rice, which provides financial support to a Rice undergraduate (almost always a declared Computer Science major).

You may be tempted to download a pirated copy from the Internet. If you have respect for intellectual property rights, you will avoid the pirated versions.

One problem with using a text written by the professor is that the lectures and the book take, largely, the same approach to the material. You are encouraged to consult other texts and other sources. Fondren Library has an excellent collection of texts on compiler construction that can provide additional enlightenment and alternative viewpoints.

Syllabus

Rice policy requires a published syllabus for the course.

Comp 412 Home Last modified Thursday, 29-Aug-2019 15:41:22 CDT.