This is a very good intermediate/advanced text for codegen & optimization.

Having spent nearly 15 years working on compiler development, with most of it spent on codegen & optimization in compiler backends, I was very happy to see this book published ten years ago when I was relatively new to the field and hungry for more information.

The good: Coverage of many important topics, and a better discussion of the phase ordering issues than I've seen in other texts.

The bad: The writing style is okay, but not great. Little insight is typically given for the problems discussed. A very annoying aspect of the book is that the author sometimes goes into great detail about one technique, and then later mentions another (often superior, IMO) way to solve the problem at hand, without going into much detail. As a working compiler writer, I would have preferred it be the other way around.

The very very bad: The ICAN notation used throughout the book is verbose, unintuitive, and ultimately takes away from the presentation. Compare the complicated detail-filled ICAN listings in this book to the simple, elegant algorithms in the Dragon Book or Cooper/Torczon's text.

It's the bible of compiler data-flow analysis. The author had the experience of building an industrial strength compiler. One tip: skip books authored by those who haven't implemented an industrial strength compiler by themself.

Compiler development is more of a craft than a science, although there's plenty of science involved. It involves huge numbers of tradeoffs in features, optimizations, and use of the underlying processor. But, as long as people keep coming up with new computing platforms (and not just instruction set processors), new languages, and new performance demands there will always be need for new compiler developers. If you can't apprentice yourself to masters of the craft, or even if you can, this book is a great introduction 2000-era compiler development.

Muchnik does a clear, thorough job of laying out the basics, starting with the intermediate representation used. (If you get that wrong, nothing else is going to work.) He then moves on to the basics of symbol table structure - an issue that can get immensely complicated in systems like Microsoft's CLR. He also discusses run time support briefly. Although that discussion is good as far as it goes, it skips past a lot of the complexities of dynamic loading, debug symbol tables, simulation support, and related issues. They aren't strictly part of the compiled, executable code, but responsibilities of the compiler developer nonetheless. Next comes a brief description of code generation, crucial in normal environments but tangential to my own needs.

That's just the first quarter of the book, though. The rest is the real meat of the topic: code analysis and optimization techniques, over 600 pages of discussion. It's way too much to summarize here, but even that just an introduction to a huge technology. Still, you have to start somewhere.

By this point, you may be asking "But what about tokens, lexemes, and grammars? Isn't that what compilers do?" Well, yes, but it's done. Tool developers have made lexical analysis a commodity. The easily automated tasks are not where modern compiler distinguishes itself. This book addresses the semantic levels, getting the reader into the shallow end of the industry's huge pool of specialized compilation knowledge.

If you have to self-teach compiler development - good luck. Start here, though, and luck will have a lot less to do with the outcome.

//wiredweird

I've seen chapter 14 of this book referenced (by a university professor giving suggestion to his students, not by a random guy) as:

"Another conventional approach to strength reduction. 35 pages of the same kind of confusing crap we've all come to expect from this book."

This could not sum it up better. A confusing book at best, presenting basic material so as to make it look "advanced", and without any covering of even relatively new techniques. A good source of references to papers that you should read, but not at all a valid reference on its own.

Ok, let's be fair. This book provides a broad coverage of useful optimizations and it will be useful in case you work writing compilers AND have some experience.

However, for learning the concepts, it is a very bad material. At the end you end up confused under a pile of thousands of lines of pseudocode in a weird notation (invented by the author) called "I CAN" (yes you can write a very bad book Mr. Muchnick) instead of reading useful explanations of the topics. The author also assumes that you already know some concepts and that's why he does not explain them as he should. If you want to really understand this book, first review Chapter 10 of the Dragon Book. I thought that the Dragon book was not so good because you have to re read some things in order to fully understand, but with Muchnick's book that is not always possible.

You can also take a look at Morgan's book (unfortunately, out of print) or just read the papers (as the first reviewer suggested). This book is not enough, and sadly, a lot of "teachers" think of it as a kind of "bible" and as a very bad excuse to teach very poorly. Some of them even don't master all the concepts presented there and have to use other books (their "dirty little secret") but they don't tell you which ones and continue praising this bad piece of work. If you are a CS student who really wants to learn, be warned that this book is not for you (it has at least three erratas and still has errors!)