Compiler Frontend

Purpose

Guide agents through building a compiler frontend: lexers (hand-written DFA vs flex), Pratt parsing for expressions, recursive-descent for statements, AST design, symbol tables with scoped hash maps, type checking basics, error recovery strategies, and LLVM IR generation via the C API or llvm-sys.

When to Use

• Implementing a new programming language or DSL
• Adding expression parsing to an interpreter or config language
• Designing AST node hierarchies in C or Rust
• Building scoped symbol tables for variables and functions
• Implementing basic type inference or checking
• Emitting LLVM IR from a typed AST

Workflow

1. Pipeline overview