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Jun 16, 2011 at 13:31 history made wiki Post Made Community Wiki by Michael Ekstrand
Jun 15, 2011 at 21:36 comment added Ira Baxter Sorry... missed the point about wanting to learn about (building?) OSes. My point stands: he doesn't need a lot of OS knowledge for compilers. In fact, its pretty much a completely different topic, except where the compiler and the OS interact to achieve some collective purpose. (Multics required its PL/1 compilers to build function calls in certain ways to enable a global VM, for instance).
Jun 15, 2011 at 20:48 comment added plafond @Ira - agreed. I never stated that understanding the OS is required to build a compiler/language, simply explained that it might be an easier starting point. Everyone is focusing on the 'compiler' aspect of his question but he also mentioned that he wants a better understanding of OS' and libraries. For a 15 year old still learning about architectures, it would be much more useful to understand memory management, threading, locking, i/o, etc.. than learning how to define a grammar with yacc (IMHO)
Jun 15, 2011 at 20:47 comment added David Thornley Immediately after saying he wanted to learn language design and compilers, he said he wanted to learn about OSes.
Jun 15, 2011 at 20:30 comment added Ira Baxter OS concepts? Very little of that is needed to build a compiler. What is needed is understanding of software architectures: addresss spaces, stacks, threads (if he wants to learn compilers, he better learn about parallelism, its his future).
Jun 15, 2011 at 20:05 history answered plafond CC BY-SA 3.0