Compiler design is a fundamental topic in computer science. It teaches you how programming languages are translated into machine code.
Lexical analysis: The first phase breaks source code into tokens — keywords, identifiers, operators, and literals.
Syntax analysis: Parsing builds a tree structure from tokens according to grammar rules. This is where you catch syntax errors.
Code generation: The final phase produces target code, whether assembly or bytecode.
My compiler-design-project on GitHub implements these phases in C. It's a great learning exercise for anyone studying systems programming.
Written by Jafor Sadak — follow my work at jaforsadak.dev.