Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its qui...
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Bril is the only compiler IL I know of that is specifically designed for education.
R. Kent Dybvig's compilers course has had approximately 15 "intermediate" representations designed for his course since at least 2004 -- a consequence of teaching the course using the nanopass compiler framework for scheme. You could broadly divide these into "representations that are restrictions of scheme," and "representations that are increasingly-annotated versions of UIL" where UIL is the underlying intermediate representation. As far as I know, UIL was also designed for this course.