A01375332 Compiler Design Blog

  First of all, I agree her story should be more widespread in the computer science field, I had heard her name before as the mother of COBOL, but she was only fleetingly mentioned. Her contributions to the field are enormous ones as it allowed the field to become more widespread and therefore reach more people and change how we do things. I agree with the statement that her life and contributions should be taught like Turing and other important figures of the field are taught. It was a nice documentary about her, and she seemed like a really interesting person. A short one, but it manages to capture your attention during every moment. It is really nice that Grace Hopper was recognized and you can see that she was proud of what she accomplished and that the women talking during the documentary really had an admiration for her. Without compilers and higher level languages, programming would be a much more difficult task, I remember when we had to program in assembly language and even

In the podcast when Morgan Deters speaks about the internals of the GCC compiler it was interesting to note how the compiler compiles itself first using the C language to compile like a basic version of itself and then using that basic version compiles the full version, so that it does not assumes that the system has features of libraries that it needs, after the classes on the tombstones diagrams this makes sense and seems like a smart solution. Also building the whole front end without classes to avoid relying on features a system does not have is a really nice solution. I haven’t asked myself how they implemented in a compiler features that the language did not support and seeing that they use “cheap tricks” like the one he describes to implement polymorphism, but it makes sense that some creative solutions should arise to fill those functionality voids. I got really lost in the register allocation phase part of the podcast, I did not understand that part at all. It would be nice to