Building a Tiny Compiler by Samuel Giddins

Bio: Samuel is a developer well-versed in the rituals of writing developer tools that sometimes work. When he's not breaking Bundler and CocoaPods, you can find him at the library at UChicago, studying something impractical. In a former life, he has worked on everything from social networking apps to databases to constrained optimization problems. When not coding, Samuel is often found in the library doing homework, wishing he were writing code.

Abstract: We all use compilers every day, but they still can seem like a mysterious black box at times. We're going to build a tiny compiler for a made-up language 100% from scratch to get a feel for the basics of how compilers work. We'll also look at some of the ways Swift can yield elegant solutions for complex problems such as parsing, lexing, and code generation. At the end, we'll have a working implementation of a brand-new programming language.

Transcript