55 Best Compiler Books of All Time

Write code that writes code with Elixir macros. Macros make metaprogramming possible and define the language itself. In this book, you'll learn how to use macros to extend the language with fast, maintainable code and share functionality in ways you never thought possible. You'll discover how to extend Elixir with your own first-class features, optimize performance, and create domain-specific languages.

Metaprogramming is one of Elixir's greatest features. Maybe you've played with the basics or written a few macros. Now you want to take it to the next level. This book is a guided series of metaprogramming tutorials that take you step by step to metaprogramming mastery. You'll extend Elixir with powerful features and write faster, more maintainable programs in ways unmatched by other languages.

You'll start with the basics of Elixir's metaprogramming system and find out how macros interact with Elixir's abstract format. Then you'll extend Elixir with your own first-class features, write a testing framework, and discover how Elixir treats source code as building blocks, rather than rote lines of instructions. You'll continue your journey by using advanced code generation to create essential libraries in strikingly few lines of code. Finally, you'll create domain-specific languages and learn when and where to apply your skills effectively.

When you're done, you will have mastered metaprogramming, gained insights into Elixir's internals, and have the confidence to leverage macros to their full potential in your own projects.

Programming Language Pragmatics addresses the fundamental principles at work in the most important contemporary languages, highlights the critical relationship between language design and language implementation, and devotes special attention to issues of importance to the expert programmer. Thanks to its rigorous but accessible teaching style, you ll emerge better prepared to choose the best language for particular projects, to make more effective use of languages you already know, and to learn new languages quickly and completely.

Features

About the Author

Michael L. Scott is a professor in the University of Rochester's Department of Computer Science, which he chaired from 1996 to 1999. He is the designer of the Lynx distributed programming language and a co-designer of the Charlotte and Psyche parallel operating systems, the Bridge parallel file system, the Cashmere distributed shared memory system, and the MCS mutual exclusion lock. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985.

From the Foreword by Susan L. Graham:
This book takes on the challenges of contemporary languages and
architectures, and prepares the reader for the new compiling problems that
will inevitably arise in the future.

The definitive book on advanced compiler design
This comprehensive, up-to-date work examines advanced issues in the design
and implementation of compilers for modern processors. Written for
professionals and graduate students, the book guides readers in designing
and implementing efficient structures for highly optimizing compilers for
real-world languages. Covering advanced issues in fundamental areas of
compiler design, this book discusses a wide array of possible code
optimizations, determining the relative importance of optimizations, and
selecting the most effective methods of implementation.
* Lays the foundation for understanding the major issues of advanced
compiler design
* Treats optimization in-depth
* Uses four case studies of commercial compiling suites to illustrate
different approaches to compiler structure, intermediate-code design, and
optimization these include Sun Microsystems's compiler for SPARC, IBM's for
POWER and PowerPC, DEC's for Alpha, and Intel's for Pentium an related
processors
* Presents numerous clearly defined algorithms based on actual cases
* Introduces Informal Compiler Algorithm Notation (ICAN), a language devised
by the author to communicate algorithms effectively to people