this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Can confirm, even the little training compiler we made at Uni for a subset of Java (Javali) had a backend and frontend.
I can't imagine trying to spit out machine code while parsing the input without an intermediary AST stage. It was complicated enough with the proper split.
I can imagine;
I have built single pass compilers that do everything in one shot without an AST. You are not going to get great error messages or optimization though.
Oh! Okay, that's interesting to me! What was the input language? I imagine it might be a little more doable if it's closer to hardware?
I don't remember that well, but I think the object oriented stuff with dynamic dispatch was hard to deal with.