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Introduction to compiler design (2nd ed.)
Mogensen T., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2017. 258 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319669-65-6)
Date Reviewed: Feb 15 2019

Compiler design seems to be a rather narrow topic, which should interest only computer science undergraduate or graduate students in the framework of a mandatory course. After all, how many people will have in their professional life the opportunity to build a new compiler, or even improve an existing one? The number of new programming languages is shrinking more and more, and most of them lead to an interpreted implementation, thus not using any of the principles and techniques of type checking, intermediate code, machine code, register allocation, and various optimizations. Moreover, the fingers of one hand are enough to count the available machine languages.

Yet if you ask Amazon about books on compiler design, or a related topic, you get a listing of titles so lengthy that following it to its end seems useless. Among them, some books or book series are prominent, especially those that include among their authors people like Alfred V. Aho, Dick Grune, Reinhard Whilhelm, Jeffrey D. Ullman, Ravi Sethi, Steven Muchnick, and many others. Thus is it useful to publish yet another book, and what does the present book offer in the area of novelty?

One first characteristic of the present book is its length: although other books are 600 to 900 pages, this one is only 256 pages long--hence the word “introduction” in its title.

But this introduction does not present the first part of compiler design, nor its principles: on the contrary, the theory behind some chapters is quite scanty, which is a little annoying for a matter like scanning, covered in less than 60 pages. Thus I could describe this book as a summary about compiler design. A typical example is that although there are exercises at the end of all the chapters, no solution, or even attempt at a solution, is proposed.

The preceding remarks may be considered as only negative. That’s not my purpose, since the existence of a cheap and short book is useful: it may interest people who want to understand the basics of compiler design, or people who follow a short course on this matter. Moreover, the chapters cover matters seldom found in similar books, for example, register allocation, functions, and data-flow analysis. But an important caveat is that this book will not be able to replace large and thick books, which need much more investment from the readers but will teach them much more.

There is a practical detail which I found a little tiresome: there are references to further reading in each chapter, but you have to search for the end of the chapter in order to know what each reference is. A list of further readings at the end of the book would be more practical.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads

Reviewer:  O. Lecarme Review #: CR146437 (1905-0153)
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