Top all-time · #4438
Nora Sandler
Personal blog · norasandler.comprogramming
Nora Sandler's personal blog at norasandler.com covers programming. Since 2017, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “Writing a C Compiler, Part 1”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Nora Sandler's blog and her book Writing a C Compiler, an incremental guide to building a compiler, along with her revisit of Let's Build a Compiler.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
it's a blog
Most-linked posts?
- Writing a C Compiler, Part 15 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-12-01
- Writing a C Compiler3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-25
- Writing a C Compiler is a book2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-29
- Around the World With Unicode2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-01
- Writing a C Compiler Is Here2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-20
What Hacker News says?
> Rather than getting stuck in front-end minutiae, the tutorial goes straight to generating working assembly code, from very early on. I think this is important and for a more sophisticated compiler design I find Ghuloum approach very appealing [1]. I.e. build a very simple subset of the language from top to bottom and then grow the meat gradually. The really great book following this approach I've discovered recent…
Comment linking /2024/08/20/The-Book-Is-Here.html
on “Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"”Submitted Writing a C Compiler, Part 1 as a story · 369 points
HN discussionVery cool. I think Wasm is a nice instruction set, but I agree that its structured control flow is a bit weird and also the lack of instructions to handle the memory stack. But it's much more cleaner than something like x86_64. If you are interesting in learning in more detail how to write a C compiler, I highly recommend the book "Writing a C Compiler" by Nora Sandler [0]. This is a super detailed, incremental guid…
Comment linking /book/
on “Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python (2023)”Submitted Writing a C Compiler, Part 2 as a story · 241 points
HN discussionThis is a good point, thank you for bringing it up! I added a footnote about it: https://norasandler.com/2017/12/05/Write-a-Compiler-2.html#f...
Comment linking /2017/12/05/Write-a-Compiler-2.html
on “Writing a C Compiler, Part 2”Submitted Writing a C Compiler, Part 5 as a story · 183 points
HN discussionI heard that new volume is updated with newer stuffs like data flow analysis, garbage collection, etc. Anyway the book doesn't teach you how to build a basic working compiler, so need to consult another materials. Try Andrew Appel's "Modern Compiler implementation in Java/C/ML" or Writing a C Compiler ( https://norasandler.com/book ) which is much more recent. Eventually, you'd want to hack GCC/LLVM because they are…
Comment linking /book
on “Build a Compiler in Five Projects”Submitted Writing a C Compiler is a book as a story · 62 points
HN discussionOh that’s exactly what the book’s author blog mentions: https://norasandler.com/2017/11/29/Write-a-Compiler.html
Comment linking /2017/11/29/Write-a-Compiler.html
on “Working through 'Writing A C Compiler'”Submitted 'Writing a C Compiler' is a book (2022) as a story · 47 points
HN discussionThe author of the book also has a series of blog entries: https://norasandler.com/2017/11/29/Write-a-Compiler.html
Comment linking /2017/11/29/Write-a-Compiler.html
on “Working through 'Writing A C Compiler'”Submitted Around the World With Unicode as a story · 19 points
HN discussionInspired by Ghuloum's book is this really nice book by Nora Sandler: Writing a C Compiler https://norasandler.com/book/
Comment linking /book/
on “Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers (2008)”Submitted Writing a C Compiler: Book Update as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C Compiler as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C compiler – Series as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C Compiler Is Here as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is a Neural Network? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C Compiler, Part 3 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C Compiler as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Around the Globe with Unicode as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Writing a C Compiler (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
