Get the latest tech news
Writing that changed how I think about programming languages
Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.
Parsing expressions by precedence climbing by Eli Bendersky presented an understandable and easier-to-develop alternative to traditional hand-written recursive descent parsers. egg: Fast and extensible equality saturation by [multiple authors] changed how I think about optimizers and pass ordering. This (and some off-hand comments by Cliff Click about bump-allocation only taking “a few clocks”) changed how I think about allocating and referring to IR nodes.
Or read this on Hacker News