Compiler design in C

What Hacker News says

1. pjmlpApr 2026
   It was a product of its time I guess, much better ones from similar vintage,

   The Tiger book (with C, Standard ML, and Java variants)

   https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/

   Compiler Design in C (freely available nowadays, beware this is between K&R C and C89)

   https://holub.com/compiler/

   lcc, A Retargetable Compiler for ANSI C

   https://drh.github.io/lcc/

   Or if one wants to go with more clever stuff,

   Compiling with Continuations

   Lisp in Small Pieces

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2. pjmlpNov 2023
   Congratulations, good luck with your projects.

   Compilers was one of the first rabbit holes that drove my interest into computing.

   One of the books that I endless read multiple times, is nowadays available for free, and eventually interesting for your reading collection, even though it is about the compiler part not debugging.

   "Compiler Design in C"

   https://holub.com/compiler/

   It is a bit oldie, but maybe interesting.

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3. tzsNov 2022
   Although it is older than a fair number of HN readers, a great book from 1990 on compilers is Allen Holub's "Compiler Design in C". It's long out of print but there is a free PDF on Holub's website [1].

   The book covers the usual theory and then puts it to use to develop tools for writing compilers (e.g., lexical analyzer generators similar to lex and parser generators similar to yacc) and then with those tools develops a C compiler.

   [1] https://holub.com/compiler/

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4. pjmlpMar 2022
   If besides the author's book (good work), you want to delve into how others approach the subject, check

   - Retargetable C Compiler, A: Design and Implementation

   - Compiler Design in C

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5. coder4lifeSep 2021
   "Enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot - rules for C and C++ programmers" by Alan C Holub.

   And "Compiler design in C", also by him

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6. hasitsethApr 2021
   Alan Holub's 'Compiler Design in C' is not mentioned in the books. Holub's book had well-written code. I had learned a lot from his code.
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