[llvm-dev] EuroLLVM BoF session: Compilers in education

[David Chisnall via llvm-dev]

On 1 Mar 2016, at 16:27, Roel Jordans via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> - Would you be interested in attending this session?

Yes, I’m looking forward to it.

> - For industry people:
> * what kind of skills would you like your future (or current) employees to have?
> * do you have any educational materials you would be willing to share?
> - For other educators: what kind of topics do you cover in your lectures?
> * would you be interested in presenting something about your approach?

I’d be happy to talk briefly about the course that I teach, which is the Masters’ compiler course at Cambridge.  I have some resources online:

http://compilerteaching.github.io

The focus of the course is on real problems and techniques for late-bound dynamic languages (things a bit like JavaScript and parallel languages (things a bit like OpenCL C / CUDA).  The students have to do three shortish exercises.  The first is a small amount of analysis, the second two each involve one of the toy languages: typically something like adding something like polymorphic inline caching or type specialisation to MysoreScript (a milder, less bitter JavaScriptl-like language) and adding either automatic paralellisation or vectorisation to the cellular automata DSL (which has an mostly parallel abstract machine, but a reference implementation that is purely sequential).  They then have to do a miniproject (80% of the mark, producing something in the structure of a research paper) on something real.  One of my students will be at EuroLLVM presenting a poster about his miniproject, so he can talk about what he’s learned.  In previous years I’ve had people do things like adding small integer support to Pyston, evaluating the LLVM code generation of barriers on ARM (EuroLLVM 2014), or optimising memory allocation for the PImpl pattern (EuroLLVM 2015).

David