compiler

Matt Godbolt's CppCon 2017 talk shows what modern compilers do with your C++ code, using Compiler Explorer to inspect generated assembly. It covers surprising optimizations and how the tool works.

A two-hour live stream in which Aaron Hsu explains the architecture, design history and aesthetic of Co-dfns, his parallel APL compiler. He walks through the code and the reasoning behind its dense style.

Matt Godbolt, creator of Compiler Explorer, tours surprising optimizations modern compilers perform, such as turning loops into closed-form sums and using popcount instructions. He explores what the compiler does behind the scenes.

Chris Lattner's ASPLOS 2021 keynote on the golden age of compiler design in an era of hardware and software co-design, covering compiler infrastructure for accelerators and unifying hardware IRs.

Matt Godbolt tells the story of Compiler Explorer, from a hacky basement server to a cloud-scaled service handling tens of thousands of daily requests. He also shows its features and how it is built.

Andy Keep's Clojure/Conj talk on writing a nanopass compiler, built from many single-task passes with formally defined intermediate languages. It covers the framework's origins in a compiler teaching course at Indiana University.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk on modernizing compiler design for the Carbon toolchain, using data-oriented design and modern hardware assumptions. It covers lexing, parsing and compact data structures aimed at compiler performance.

Martin Odersky's JVM Language Summit 2015 talk argues that compilers can be thought of as databases. It describes design ideas for the Scala compiler and for developer tools.

Brandt Bucher presents his prototype JIT compiler for CPython at the 2023 Core Developer Sprint. He explains the copy-and-patch approach, the implementation and its performance.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

Andrew Kelley's roadmap talk on upcoming Zig compiler milestones, focused on compilation speed. It was given at a Zig community event in 2022.

Tom7 explains how he built a SIGBOVIK 2017 paper made only of printable ASCII bytes that is also a valid DOS executable. He writes a C compiler targeting printable x86 without self-modifying code and solves the puzzles the constraint creates.

Anders Hejlsberg introduces the native port of the TypeScript compiler, written in Go, which promises roughly 10x faster tooling. He demos compiling VS Code and explains where the speedup comes from.

Chandler Carruth's GoingNative 2012 talk on Clang, covering how the compiler helps defend C++ code from mistakes. It makes the case for Clang's diagnostics and tooling.

Paul Phillips, a former Scala core contributor, argues after moving a million lines of code that much of what the software industry does is wrong. He critiques Scala and compiler design and calls for better approaches.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2013 keynote on how C++ builds complex software from simple emergent structures, and how compilers optimize them through inlining and value semantics.

Paul Biggar's Google Tech Talk on compiling and optimizing scripting languages, drawn from his work on the phc ahead-of-time PHP compiler. He covers runtime typing, aliasing and code generation challenges, and argues AOT can compete with JIT.

A React Conf talk by Xuan Huang previewing React Forget, a compiler that automatically memoizes components. It argues for making memoization the default so developers need not write useMemo or useCallback by hand.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Jan Vitek of Northeastern University gives a meetup talk on the challenges of making the R language run fast. He explains what in R's semantics makes it hard to optimize and to build a JIT compiler for.

Paul Phillips, a major Scala compiler contributor, gives a long talk on Scala collections and views, using it to critique Scala's design and direction.

Swift compiler engineers explain how Swift implements generics using dictionary-passing with reified type metadata. They compare it with Java-style uniform representation and C++ or Rust monomorphization.

Christian Schafmeister presents lessons from six years of implementing Clasp, a Common Lisp compiler using LLVM as its backend that interoperates with C++. He explains handling a dynamic, memory-managed language on LLVM.

Chris Thalinger of Twitter describes the company's effort to run its Scala services on the Graal JIT compiler at Scala Days NYC 2018. It covers the performance gains Twitter saw and the work of running Graal in production.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

Simon Peyton Jones explains nested data parallelism and Data Parallel Haskell, an approach to exploiting multicore and distributed hardware while keeping a simple single-control-flow programming model.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

Chris Seaton talks about JRuby+Truffle, explaining how the Truffle and Graal combination optimises the tricky parts of Ruby and why it outperforms other Ruby implementations.

Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing talks at a Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetup about using Common Lisp for quantum computing. He covers the technical, sociological and psychological sides of working across disciplines.

Andrew Kelley's 2024 Zig roadmap talk, followed by a Q&A, covers the language's priorities and the state of the project. Topics include compilation speed, moving off LLVM toward a self-hosted toolchain, async, and the path to 1.0.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

Julia co-creator Jeff Bezanson candidly lists fundamental problems with the language at JuliaCon 2019, including modularity, types and compiler latency, and how they might be solved.