Between 1988 and 1995 Jack Crenshaw posted on Usenet "Let's Build a Compiler", a tutorial series on writing a Pascal compiler that generates 68K Assembly. 35 years later Eli Bendersky revisited the series and rewrote the compiler in Python to generate WebAssembly.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2025/revisiting-lets-build-a-compiler
@amoroso That series got me all the way from ideating a toy CPU with a friend to actually making a language we could use for it, it felt so rewarding. Very nice, gentle introduction to the topic :)
@allpurposemat What system did it run on? MS-DOS?
@amoroso I wrote it in Java, so it could run on, well, probably any of those 3 Billion Devices that supposedly run Java. 😅
The compiler would turn a very basic lang into assembler, which then was immediately run through another "compiler" that actually output the bytecode. Then we'd run it on an emulator I (very poorly) wrote for the CPU. It was a very nice alternative to hex editing programs with the opcode table on the side, which was the what we were doing before!
