AAaap_·Aug 11, 2018
I wrote a compiler for B some years ago. The code generation is horrible but it was a fun project:
https://github.com/aap/abc/
Still mean to port that to the PDP-10 eventually.
In Users' Reference to B (1972)aap
abc
C2013–2018
aap / abc
abc
(OBSOLETE) A B Compiler for x86
2Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
53GitHub stars
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(OBSOLETE) A B Compiler for x86
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-05-22 05:49:56 UTC to 2018-08-11 08:13:42 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI wrote a Basic interpreter once (for Infocom's Z-machine). Holy cow, that's an ugly language to parse. It's all ad-hoc rules and heuristics and endless weird edge cases. It just wasn't fun.
Forth's a good choice, and will teach you lots of assembly, but it's not really a compiler, and Z80 Forth's been done to death.
But... and I should point out that where I am it's half past midnight and I'm going weird and random... if you want an off-the-wall but useful language to do an actual compiler for, you might want to check out B. It's like a typeless simplified C (although it's really the other way round), and is eminently suited to tiny architectures.
Tiny example:
http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-b-1247.html
x86 B compiler written in C, containing links to the language reference:
https://github.com/aap/abc
In The BASIC Issue with Retro ComputersMy plan is to have my B compiler (https://github.com/aap/abc) spit out PDP-10 assembly eventually. It would be a perfect fit since B assumes word addressed memory.
In Show HN: A simple bare-metal Forth for the PDP-10Also see my B compiler that was inspired by these early C compilers: https://github.com/aap/abc
In Dennis Ritchie's first C compiler on Github