Compiler construction

What Hacker News says

1. prydtFeb 2026
   I would highly recommend Wirth's Compiler Construction. Great, short book with a lot to say.
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2. microtherionDec 2025
   Wirth also wrote an extremely accessible book on Compiler Construction, using exactly the hand written recursive descent parsing approach discussed by OP.

   The initial edition was published in 1976, in German, but the latest version is available online:

   https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...

   There are also parser generators like ANTLR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANTLR) which take an input not unlike yacc, but generate a LL parser using explicit code, rather than the table driven LALR parsing of yacc.

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3. eatonphilJan 2024
   I loved the book Compiler Construction. Wirth's emphasis on minimalism is a huge inspiration.
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4. i_don_t_knowOct 2023
   Niklas Wirth wrote a nice concise book on compiler construction. He’s targeting his own register-based RISC architecture.

   https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/index....

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5. johndoe0815Aug 2023
   I can also recommend Niklaus Wirth's "Project Oberon" - not quite literate programming, but extremely well explained code examples and data structures of the Oberon OS/language/UI system: http://www.projectoberon.net

   Wirth's "Compiler Construction" is very concise and written in a similar way: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/ - he manages to describe a complete compiler for an Oberon subset (earlier versions of the book used PASCAL) in a bit more than 100 pages.

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6. johndoe0815Sep 2022
   Maybe not revolutionary, but I think this article about static binary translation is a great introduction to the topic:

   http://www.gtoal.com/sbt/

   (see also the "Virtual Machines" book by Smith and Nair, ISBN-13 978-1558609105, if you are interested in this topic).

   I can also recommend John Lions' "Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System" - https://warsus.github.io/lions-/, Douglas Comer's Xinu (https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu) as well as Niklaus Wirth's "Compiler Construction" (https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...) and Project Oberon (http://www.projectoberon.com).

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