Modernizing Compiler Design for Carbon Toolchain - Chandler Carruth - CppNow 2023

CppNow · 70.7K views · 2023-08-17 · 1:35:12

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Overview

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk on modernizing compiler design for the Carbon toolchain, using data-oriented design and modern hardware assumptions. It covers lexing, parsing and compact data structures aimed at compiler performance.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a recent take on rethinking compiler architecture, and cited in discussions of flattened ASTs and fast lexers.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2023–2025

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysis Software performance & optimization C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages

What people said

di4na · 2023-08 · Recommendation
No but it is endemic to how we think about compilers up to now, and especially when the rust compiler arch was massively developed, more than 10 years ago. I recommend a watch of this for a recent take on trying to change how we think of these. It is an open research field [VIDEO]
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norskeld · 2025-07 · Reference
Is lexing ever a bottleneck though? Even if you push for lexing and parsing 10M lines/second [1], I'd argue that semantic analysis and codegen (for AOT-compiled languages) will dominate the timings. That said, there's no reason not to squeeze every bit of performance out of it! [1]: In this talk about the Carbon language, Chandler Carruth shows and explains some goals/challenges regarding performance: [VIDEO]
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wrsh07 · 2025-01 · Reference
Chandler discusses it in this video though! [VIDEO] You get some traversals for free with this layout (preorder, reverse post order). Can search for subtrees with string searching algorithms or more complex things with regex.
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