Building a Compiler from First Principles

The moment I wrote my first program, I knew I wanted to build a programming language. But how are languages made? How did these carefully arranged magic spells become instructions a machine could execute? For a long time, compiler construction was my main technical obsession — and it still is. I devoured anything I could find about compilers, intermediate representations, parsers, and LLVM. I worked through the Kaleidoscope tutorials and spent hours refining the syntax of my soon-to-be language. At the start of my third year of college, that obsession led me to an internship with Intel's Compilers and Languages team. I was suddenly being paid to work on real programming languages used by real developers. Eight years later, I know much more about compilers, CPUs, GPUs, and the systems around them. I also have more questions. Why are production compilers so complicated? Which parts of that complexity are inherent to the problem, and which are consequences of accumulated design decis