writing about pratt parsing so I remember it

A hands-on walkthrough of Pratt parsing for C expressions: why it rarely shows up in standard compiler courses, how binding power handles precedence and associativity, and how prefix, infix and postfix subroutines keep the parser core small, with pointers to Crafting Interpreters.

Tutorial · Programming · Compilers

I can't use generic lambdas at compile-time, now what?

Braden Ganetsky follows up his 'Break MSVC and Clang' post with a deep dive into working around a Clang bug that blocks using generic lambdas in constant evaluation, explaining how he got a compile-time C++ technique to work on Clang 16 onward.

Tutorial · C++ · Compilers · Programming

PGO or not PGO this is the dilemma. Step 2Step 2: How it works

The second of Marco Tusa's three-part Percona series on profile-guided optimization explains how PGO works as a two-pass build: instrumented binaries record per-edge control-flow counters during a training workload, and the compiler then uses those counts for inlining, branch layout, hot/cold splitting and code ordering, which is why MySQL's MTR test suite transfers well as training data.

Tutorial · MySQL · Databases · Compilers · Performance

Hooking into the Go Toolchain

A hands-on tour of go build -toolexec: how the go command invokes the compiler, assembler and linker, and how to time, rewrite and instrument every run, from a simple stopwatch to injecting packages via importcfg and keeping the build cache honest, as used by garble, Orchestrion and OpenTelemetry's otelc.

Tutorial · Go · Compilers · Toolchains · OpenTelemetry

Writing a ray tracer in Brainfuck

A playful systems post that implements a ray tracer in Brainfuck—compilers, esolangs, and the surprising claim that sometimes the correct answer is to write a compiler.

Tutorial · Programming · Compilers · Graphics · Open Source

Adding Go's defer to the TypeScript Compiler

Andrew Healey forks the Go-based TypeScript compiler to add a Go-style defer statement, walking through how the compiler is structured, how defer should behave including error handling, and the JavaScript it emits, before concluding defer probably should not exist and that TypeScript's using declarations are the closer fit.

Tutorial · TypeScript · Compilers · Programming Languages