Compilers: Incrementally and Extensibly (2024)

>The compiler itself is to be developed in OCaml.

These seems like a misstep that I've seen in a few other compiler implementation courses. For some reason these programming language professors always insist on completing the project in their personal favorite language (Haskell, OCaml, Standard ML, etc).

As a student this makes the project significantly more difficult. Instead of just learning how to implement a complier, you're also learning a new (and likely difficult) programming language.

I grew up with "easy" languages. Pascal, VB, C, C++, Java, C#. And frankly I'm getting real sick of them.

I'm porting Dijkstra's algorithm over to C# at the moment, and in the last several hours here's the two most clownish things that have happened:

1) I have:

  if (node is null) {
    ..
  }

My IDE is telling me "Expression is always false according to nullable reference types' annotations". Nevertheless it enters that section every time.

2) I have:

  SortedSet<int> nums = [];
  Console.Out.WriteLine(nums.Min);

You know what this prints?

  0

The minimal element of a set which has no elements is 0.

Yes, every language has its warts, and anecdotes like this aren't going to change anyone's mind. I only wrote these up because they're hitting me right now in one of those languages that companies use "because anyone can learn them". I like harder languages better than easy languages, because they're easy.