Guest lecture at Dr. Gommerstadt's Compiler course at Vassar College, March 2025

This 2025 lecture was given at Dr. Gommerstaad's 2025 Vassar College compiler class. It also contains an introduction to decompilation and some miscellaneous ramblings around compilation.

The audio has been heavily edited. I have strived in many places for correctness over audibility. So some of the audio may not be intelligible without following a transcript or subtitles.

Some of the material is very specific to the course and the course compiler. For example, this is why I spent a little more time at the beginning describing how GCC works - they use GCC as well.

Therefore, below find chapter sections to assist skipping over some of the middle section which are very specific to the course. If things get too involved. You may want to skip to either the section on decompilation or, after that, the section on the difficulty of communication.

Chapter Sections

Pervasiveness of Compilers
The debugging problem
Outline of Talk
Motivation for Debuggers - my experience
Translation Concepts
Positions - location, location, location
Adding Position Information to the 331 language
Decompilation
On the difficulty of communication
Links for more information
Questions and final comments
1193/5000

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