Introduction
This book demonstrates the process of creating a language compiler for the CLR. It
contains a mixture of generic compiler construction topics and topics specific to
compiling for the CLR.
How it came to be
For many years, I wanted to write a compiler. I read, or tried to read, a lot of books on the
subject. Two things about these books consistently turned me off: one, they were, one
and all, written using language familiar to mathematics and computer science students,
but Greek (many a time, literally) to the rest of us. Two, almost all of them were full of
information about sundry alternate means to read source code and understand it, but
contained precious little information about how to generate machine code, and
specifically machine code for the only kind of machine that I had handy; x86.
Then, I hit the jackpot; I read a brilliant article series called "Let's Build a Compiler" by
Dr. Jack Crenshaw. I love Dr. Crenshaw's approach of learning by doing, showing ONE
way of doing things while mentioning that there were others, avoiding jargon until
unavoidable and explaining it lucidly when not, and above all, keeping it simple. This
article series taught me more than all the books I had read so far, and even the books
started making more sense after I finished the series. "Let's Build a Compiler", © Jack
Crenshaw, is definitely recommended reading for anyone who wants to learn about how
compilers are built.
by Raj Chaudhuri
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