DmitrySoshnikov

sbrk is emulated via mmap today on MacOS and others, this is an abstraction (for bump allocation), not just a function

you may implement custom sbrk via mmap easily

Thanks for the feedback, and glad to see more engineers interested in deeper topics!

Yes, in fact for building a language the parsing stage should be skipped altogether (start with interpreter or bytecode). We do this in the interpreters class. And once you have a fully working VM, _now_ it is a good time to shift to parsing and design a good syntax.

For recursive descent we have a separate class "Building a Recursive descent parser from scratch" which is purely practical coding class for those interested mainly in practice.

Yes, backtracking still might be an option although has its known limitations in terms of parallel paths. We describe backtracking in this class too.

The LL in the the view of manual Recursive descent is the most used on practice along with combinators and LALR(1).

Yeah, this makes sense, thanks.

Professor Aiken is a great teacher and I love his compilers course. However as for the parsering stage, that course goes as maximum as to SLR(1) which is pretty "toy" parsing mode. That's the problem with a combined "compilers class" -- one simply can't put everything, and everything is becoming slightly superficial. That's why I have Parsers and Garbage Collectors class as separate and fully specialized course.

Thank you for the feedback, glad you liked it, and glad to see more people interested in deeper CS topics!