Comment by akkartik

Semi-tangential rant: I went to grad school for compilers, and yet I've been struggling for several months to get started building something real-world. I can build interpreters and parsers in my sleep at this point, but the crucial next step nobody talks about is having a deep knowledge and understanding of the target language that your compiler will be emitting. For a conventional native ahead-of-time compiler that requires knowledge of x86, the ELF format, OS loading and more. I suppose this is why toolkits like LLVM are so popular :/