The aim of this course is to teach the internal organization of a compiler, that is compiler middle-end and back-end. The course is held by Professor Stefano Crespi Reghizzi, who is in charge of teaching compilation theory. My duty is to teach student how theoretical concept are implemented in a real compiler.
In order to get a pass grade, students have to take an oral examination, and write a simple project about exploiting some compilation environment.
This year we selected LLVM as the compilation tool. Its main strength is modularity: code is well organized, and playing with him it is not a big deal. Thus we think that it is powerful teaching tools: code cleanness allow students working with it without much effort, and, at the same time, they have the opportunity to learn a key production-quality compilation technology.
During classes, I teach student how to think when they have to write compiler-related tools. In particular I pushed on the different kind of passes available in LLVM and how using them to implement new ones:
Students are expected to write a simple project exploiting LLVM libraries. Assignments for current year can be downloaded here:
In order to ease development effort, I made a sample project with some simple passes. This provides students a pre-configured environment to define new compilation passes and tools. The project is called COTPasses, and stored on GitHub.