• Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 day ago

    that’s just how they are made.

    Can confirm, even the little training compiler we made at Uni for a subset of Java (Javali) had a backend and frontend.

    I can’t imagine trying to spit out machine code while parsing the input without an intermediary AST stage. It was complicated enough with the proper split.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
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      22 hours ago

      I have built single pass compilers that do everything in one shot without an AST. You are not going to get great error messages or optimization though.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 hours ago

        Oh! Okay, that’s interesting to me! What was the input language? I imagine it might be a little more doable if it’s closer to hardware?

        I don’t remember that well, but I think the object oriented stuff with dynamic dispatch was hard to deal with.