CS 164: Programming Languages and Compilers

Have you ever wondered why C programs seem to run faster than Python programs? Have you ever been confused by an error message and wondered why Java couldn’t understand your program? In CS 164, we’ll learn how compilers take in code in one language and produce code in another; in particular, we’ll learn how to translate high-level languages into code that your computer’s processor can understand. We’ll get hands-on practice developing compilers for a series of increasingly complex languages. Along the way, we’ll learn some general best practices for developing and testing complex software systems.

• CS 61B. Data Structures
• CS 61C. Machine Structures

Course Culture

Students taking CS 164 come from a wide range of backgrounds. We hope to foster an inclusive and safe learning environment based on curiosity rather than competition. All members of the course community—the instructor, students, and GSIs—are expected to treat each other with courtesy and respect. Some of the responsibility for that lies with the staff, but a lot of it ultimately rests with you, the students.

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• Develop programs to translate between different programming languages
• More broadly, develop programs that operate on programs
• Explain the relationship between compilers and interpreters, and the differences between them
• Understand the tools they use to run programs—and the errors those tools produce
• Assign meaning to high-level language constructs
• Implement high-level language constructs
• Reason about what it means for a compiler to be correct
• Reason about undefined behavior
• Read and write assembly language
• Write a parser

There is no textbook for the course; all readings will be provided digitally.