this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Can confirm, even the little training compiler we made at Uni for a subset of Java (Javali) had a backend and frontend.
I can't imagine trying to spit out machine code while parsing the input without an intermediary AST stage. It was complicated enough with the proper split.
I have built single pass compilers that do everything in one shot without an AST. You are not going to get great error messages or optimization though.
I can imagine;