I wanted to bring this article, An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction, to the attention of anybody who's interested in how compilers get built. Instead of having to do a lot of work up front before anything worked, this paper describes a 24-step program that created a working compiler after each step. Iteratively, they add features until it covers most of the latest Scheme standard. Bootstrapping a compiler is usually a bit tricky, but these guys make it look quite straightforward.

(Originally found via Everything Scheme.)

I've been looking at some very old code I wrote that was a simplistic Scheme interpreter and was reading the updated Scheme specification. Following a few links to try and understand something, I ended up there.

Topics: software/scheme

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