Teaching "Introduction to compilers" with Julia, personal experience

This is continuation of thread Teaching mini-course “Introduction to compilers” with Julia, good or bad idea?. I already used Julia with @code_lowered, @code_warntype, @code_llvm and @code_native to show students various stages of compiler work. This is great that all I need to do to look at various stages of code transformation just typing one simple line of code, which is my main reason to use Julia on this course.

Course is quite elementary, my students make big easy when I dry syntax tree for simple “result = base * rate + 60” (introductory example from Dragon Book), so I just try to introduce all the basic concepts step by step. Julia works very well as real life example of compiler that allow you to look under the hood with few macros, but I want to make it even better. I would be thankful for any your idea, what else can useful on such course?

8 Likes