sigh

Yet another book which spends more than 1/3 of its pages on parsing.

Syntax doesn't matter (much), semantics matters. You need to know how to implement efficiently various PL stuff within your compiler: exceptions and algebraic effects, modules and parametric modules, parametric polymorphism and optimizations for it in presence of modularity, fibers, method dispatching in Object Oriented langs, type inference etc etc.

These books are about parsing, not about compilers. They spend a lot of time explaining how to parse a simple featureless language, instead of just use a parser generator and focus on actual programming languages design and features.

Appel's Modern compiler in ML/Java/C is way better. Also there is a great course from the creator of Chez Scheme (I bet I've seen the whole course available in the internet, but I couldn't find it anymore)

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/

http://composition.al/blog/2017/07/31/my-first-fifteen-compi...