On: Let's Build a Simple Interpreter, Part 1 (2015)

[the_duke]

Yeah, I think a more appropriate statement would have been "If you don't know how compilers work, you don't know how software works".

[nickpsecurity → the_duke]

Again, software in most HLL's that uses compilers. There's assembly, macro assemblers, and some HLL's close to the metal. For the later, you can get a list of what various constructs will look like as assembly, heuristics on what to use where, and still don't need to know compilers.

[the_duke → nickpsecurity]

But almost all software today is written in a high level language (above C).

And even in C, optimizations can change your code quite a lot.

So I do think having a basic udnerstanding of how compilers work under the hood should be required for every programmer.

As I said elswhere, every proper programmer should write at least one toy language with a compiler and / or interpreter.