The Design of an optimizing compiler

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1. Joker_vDJul 2026
   Neatly removes the lhs/rhs distinction in the compiler, although in practice tracking during the translation whether evaluating e.g. "a[i]" needs to end with DEREF or not ain't that onerous.

   But "The Design of an Optimizing Compiler" by Wulf et al. is an interesting read nonetheless; especially if you wonder how people did register allocation before Chaitin's seminal paper.

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2. FrankWilhoitMay 2026
   I did work there. BLISS was originally an academic project (at Carnegie-Mellon) whose point of departure was this. Suppose a compiler to emit machine code comparable, for size and speed, with the best hand-tuned assembler: then what kind of high-level language could be the input to that compiler? What features must it [not] have? The findings were documented in a book, The Design of an Optimizing Compiler by William Wulf et al., published 1971.
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