I was interested in this subject, and the class did not disappoint. Really interesting content that makes you realize how applicable theory can actually be for something software engineers use on a daily basis. While previous reviews from years ago seem to indicate TAs gave ambiguous answers and the assignments are vague with requirements, that was not the case this semester (and is probably no longer the case); TAs were absolutely fantastic and the grading for the project was very fair - you could have a very good idea of your score with the autograder.

While many may understand the general phases of a compiler, there was a lot more to them than I expected; things like NFA/DFA conversions and minimizations, liveness analysis, (super)local value numbering/other optimizations, and NP-complete graph coloring problem for register allocation are examples of things I had never heard of.

This class does not delve too much into compiler optimizations because there is so much content to cover to just to explain what a compiler does at a high level. In the summer, the content is reduced even further (less requirements for the project). Unfortunately, the continuation of this class that dives into advanced optimizations is only offered in person, but I hope to see it for OMSCS in the future.

General advice:

• Read the textbook if you want to maximize learning (and get the 2nd edition if they're still requesting that, since there is some content that has been removed/rearranged in the 3rd).

• The homework and exam questions were honestly more difficult than the project. Building a compiler is a long process, but after you know what to do and as long as you manage your time it's fairly straightforward (and I think the LOC in other reviews are somewhat of an exaggeration; the amount of code I wrote didn't total to be over 5000 lines, and that includes very inefficient modularity). Free response questions are human error prone and most of the points I lost were from careless mistakes.

Ways this class could be improved:

• I feel like making the final exam 35% of the grade put a lot of stress on me; potentially giving more weight to the homework (which are similar to the exam) could alleviate some of that pressure.

• Perhaps the timing is made a little off in the summer just because of the shortened term, but there were cases where I had to watch/read ahead of schedule to finish homework at a comfortable pace. If the homework is opened earlier (or there was at least corresponding sections explicitly stated that we should read/watch before completing it) I think it would've improved the experience.

Probably the most interesting/fun class I've taken so far, but I think you kind of have to be interested in the topic to begin with. This class made me more interested in this topic.