Compiler construction an incremental approach

To develop a compiler, there are a few decisions to be made.The source language, the implementation language, and the targetarchitecture must be selected.
The development time frame mustbe set.
The development methodology and the final goal must bedecided.
For the purpose of our tutorial, we made the decisionspresented below.

We show thatbuilding a compiler can be as easy as building an interpreter.
Thecompiler we construct accepts a large subset of the Scheme pro-gramming language and produces assembly code for the Intel-x86architecture, the dominant architecture of personal computing.
Thedevelopment of the compiler is broken into many small incremen-tal steps.

Compiler construction is not as complex as it is commonly per-ceived to be.
In this paper, we showed that constructing a com-piler for a large subset of Scheme that targets a real hardware issimple.

With our approach of incremental development, where everystep results in a fully working compiler for some subset of Scheme,the risk of not “completing” the compiler is minimized.
This ap-proach is useful for people learning about compilers on their own,where the amount of time they can dedicate constantly changes.