RantCompilers != Parsers
time to read 1 min | 121 words

This is just something that really annoys me. There is a common misconception that compilers are mostly about parsing the code. This couldn’t be further from the truth. About the easiest step in building a compiler is parsing the text into some form of machine readable format. There are great tools to help you there, and a lot of information.

It is the next stage that is complex, taking the machine readable format (AST) and turning that into executable. There is a lot less information about that, and that tends to be a pretty gnarly sort of a problem.

As the title says, this post is here just to make sure that people distinguish between the two.

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