I’ve got a couple of updates about my upcoming book Writing a C Compiler, which I first announced in a blog post last year.

I’ll start with the bad news: we’ve had to push the release date back until mid-2024. But I also have good news, which is that the entire book is now available early access to anyone who’s preordered through the No Starch Press website. I’ve also made the book’s companion test suite and reference implementation available on Github.

If you preordered this book last year, I realize you’ve been waiting a long time for it! I’m excited to make this early access version available, so you can start working on your compiler before the official release date. As with any early access book, you might still run into typos, layout problems, and the like, which will get fixed before the book is released. The test suite and reference implementation are also still works in progress. Between now and the book’s release date, I’ll be adding more test cases, especially for the last three chapters and the extra credit features; I’m also planning to make readability improvements to the reference implementation. Even though these codebases aren’t quite complete, they’re close enough to use while you work on the project.

Feedback!

If you have questions or corrections about the early access chapters, please email me. You can also report errors through No Starch’s Early Access comment form¹. And if you run into any issues with the test suite or reference implementation, please file a bug in that repo’s issue tracker. You can file bugs against the test suite here, and against the reference implementation here.