Customer Reviews

The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations & Machine Code Generation

5 star:		(2)
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It is a good book to read and understand. I would strongly recommend that a prospective reader read Muchnick's book before this if he/she is new to optimising compilers. Readers with some basic understanding of the structure of optimising compilers can read this book and get a good deal out of it. These books would complement each other well. I have read only a few chapters and I felt that it is also fairly deep in content (atleast to me as a novice compiler writer).

Excellent. This book, despite the usual red flags--multiple authors, huge breadth of coverage--is precisely organized, and the prose itself is consistently economical and clear. In fact, the only obstacle to absorbing the material is inherent to the field itself: compilers for modern silicon tend to be tremendously sophisticated systems.

In my case especially (I only write compilers once in a while), it is immensely valuable to have a publication that attempts to cover recent developments, such as handling deeply pipelined architectures, while still covering the fundamentals, such as register selection techniques.

Working programmers are the book's primary audience. As an illustration of that, this is the only compiler book that I've seen that actually mentions which techniques are still covered by software patents (Chaitin's original application of graph coloring to register selection is one such case, unfortunately for the state of the art).