Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today I’m sharing highlights from a blog post that explores writing that changed how the author thinks about programming languages and compilers. He kicks off with Andy Wingo’s “a simple semi-space collector,” calling its core “tiny, extensible, and can be understood in an afternoon.” CF Bolz-Tereick’s “Implementing a Toy Optimizer” taught him to use a “forwarding pointer” instead of find-and-replace. In “A Knownbits Abstract Domain…,” he learned that “if Z3 can’t find a counterexample, the code is correct.” Chris Fallin’s take on register allocation proves correctness on each input, crashing meaningfully on bugs, while Russ Cox’s “Virtual Machine Approach” demystifies regex engines in under fifty lines. Andrej Karpathy’s micrograd made neural networks click, and Fil Pizlo’s posts on SSA form and speculation in JavaScriptCore are “absolute bangers.” Allison Kaptur’s “A Python Interpreter Written in Python” made bytecode interpreters click, and Eli Bendersky’s “Parsing expressions by precedence climbing” showed parsing can be simple and elegant. For a complete list, visit bernsteinbear.com. Enjoy!
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