Learners/students and more - so you want to make a compiler?

[Zaneham]

To the many students and learners who've sent amazing emails and messages, thank you. I never expected this project to blow up the way it has, and I am genuinely humbled by it.

I am not a professional compiler engineer. I don't have a computer science degree; I'm a finance and mathematics student who fell in love with mainframes of all things. I learnt C from amazing youtubers like Low level and compilers from reading formal logic papers and books. Everything else was just being an absolute stubborn bastard who read primary sources until they made sense. The only thing I could do was try, try and try again.

If you're thinking of building something - a compiler, a parser, an emulator and/or whatever - just start it. You'll get things wrong at first and that's fine. You will encode VSRC1 as an immediate and spend an evening wondering why your GPU compares V0 to itself. You will wonder why your emulator isn't working, and the answer is on page 171 of an IBM scanned doc with a coffee stain on it. You will try and make a HAL/S compiler, realise its cooked because of HALMAT an undocumented language and then you might just decode and resurrect a language never documented publicly. You'll get to work with, meet and talk to some incredible people if you put yourself out there. This is how you learn.

In the words of the woman who made the very first compiler and arguably started this mess, Grace Hopper: "It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission"