CS4/510 Compilers and Interpreters Spring 2021

Instructor: Andrew Tolmach

Email: tolmach@pdx.edu
Office Hours: on zoom; please email for an appointment.

Course Information

Zoom course meeting site (Contact instructor for password.)
Syllabus
Slack channel Note: the first time you use this link, it will take you to the general page for the pdx-cs workspace; you need to sign in to access the specificcourse channel.
Team signup page

Textbook

Most of the course will be based on the on-line textbook by Jeremy Siek, "Essentials of Compilation: The Incremental, Nano-pass Approach." Here is the latest local OCaml version of this book, modified up through Chapter 3 (April 12 1pm). (A recent public release of the Racket version can be found here.)

Homework

Homeworks will be due weekly at noon on Mondays.
Supporting materials will be made available on this page or via github; details to be announced.
You will submit homework via github; details to be announced.
Homework 1
- Do the three warm-up exercises at the end of Chapter 1.
- Due noon, Monday, April 5.
- Homework 1 template zip file (if github doesn't work) [updated March 30 4pm]
Homework 2
- Do exercises 3 through 6 of Chapter 2.
- Supporting materials are in this github repo to which you should have access once you have "accepted" the assignment using the link sent in mail.
- Due noon, Monday, April 12.
Homework 3
- Do exercises 11 through 14 of Chapter 3. (Exercise 11 is not to hand in.)
- Supporting materials are again in the same github repo as for Chapter 2, but in branch "chapter3".
- Due noon, Monday, April 19.

Schedule

Highly subject to change!
Reading chapter references are to "Essentials of Compilation."

Date	Reading	Topics	Recording	Other
Mar 29		Introduction	Recording	Rough lecture notes Tablet dump CS320 Lecture on compiler Structure
Mar 31	Ch. 1	Preliminaries; OCaml	Recording	Ocaml examples OCaml tool summary Tablet dump
Apr 5	Ch. 2	Integers and Variables	Recording
Apr 7	Ch. 2	Integers and Variables	Recording	Tablet dump
Apr 12	Ch. 3	Review of Ch. 2; Register Allocation	Recording
Apr 14	Ch. 3	Register Allocation	Recording	Tablet dump
Apr 19 & 21	Ch. 4	Booleans and Control Flow
Apr 26 & 28	Ch. 9	Assignment and Loops
May 3	(none)	Midterm: no class
May 5	TBD	Optimization
May 10 & 12	Ch. 5	Tuples and Garbage Collection
May 17 & 19	Ch. 6	Functions
May 24 & 26	Ch. 8	Dynamic Typing
May 31	(none)	Memorial Day: no class
June 2	TBD	Efficient Interpretation
June 7-11		Final exam week

Resources

We will be using the Ocaml language, linux or MacOS operating system, and X86-64 computer architecture for the homework in this course. The current version of OCaml is 4.12.0, but any version 4.08.1 or greater should work.

You may choose to work (remotely) on the CS department linux machines, where OCaml 4.08.1 is installed. New students can obtain access to the CS linux machines via their MCECS account, which can be activated using CRAM.

OCaml download/installation instructions.

Official OCaml Language and Library Reference.

Alternative OCaml Library API Documentation.

Functional Programming in OCaml textbook.

Additional OCaml learning resources.

Notes on X86-64 programming

Debugging assembly code with gdb

General Books on Compilers

Torben Mogensen, Basics of Compiler Design, 2010. (Freely available on-line.)
Keith Cooper and Linda Torczon, Engineering a Compiler 2nd ed., Morgan Kaufmann, 2012. (First edition is almost identical.)
Al Aho, Monica Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeff Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools, 2nd ed. , Addison-Wesley, 2006.
Steve Muchnick, Advanced Compiler Design & Implmentation, Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.
Christopher Fraser and David Hanson, A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation, Benjamin/Cummings, 1995.
Andrew Appel, Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 2002. (Or earlier editions; be careful to check errata on author's web page.)
Randy Allen and Ken Kennedy, Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002.
Robert Morgan, Building an Optimizing Compiler, Digital Press, 1998.
Anders Møller and Michael Schwartzbach, Static Program Analysis, 2020. (Freely available on-line.)