flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

vgel.me · 5,740 words · saved by 1 readers

Blog about linguistics, programming, and my projects

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python Posted August 30, 2023 A few months ago, I set myself the challenge of writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python 1 , after writing my SDF donut post. How hard could it be? The answer was, pretty hard, even when dropping quite a few features. But it was also pretty interesting, and the result is surprisingly functional and not too hard to understand! There's too much code for me to comprehensively cover in a single blog post 2 , so I'll just give an overview of the decisions I made, things I had to cut, and the general architecture of the compiler,

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading