Kompilierer

Kompilierer are software tools that translate source code written in high-level programming languages into a lower-level form, commonly machine code or bytecode. The primary purpose is to produce executable programs that can run efficiently on hardware or within a virtual machine. A typical compiler operates in several stages: lexical analysis to convert text into tokens, parsing to verify grammar and build a syntax tree, semantic analysis to check types and rules, optimization to improve performance, and code generation to emit the target representation. Some compilers also perform linking, which combines multiple object files into a single executable.

Compilers may be single-pass or multi-pass, and may be optimizing or non-optimizing. They can target various outputs, including native machine code for a specific CPU architecture, assembly language, or intermediate representations used by virtual machines or back-ends, such as LLVM IR. Many modern languages use front-end/back-end architectures, where a language-specific front-end parses and type-checks the source, while a language-neutral back-end performs optimization and code generation.

Key distinctions exist between compilers and interpreters; compilers translate entire programs before execution, while interpreters translate and execute incrementally. Just-in-time (JIT) compilers perform compilation at runtime to improve performance with dynamic optimizations.

Historically, compilers have driven advances in programming languages and computer architecture, with early FORTRAN and Lisp compilers, the development of optimizing techniques, and modern toolchains such as GCC and LLVM.