alt Hacker NewsThere is nothing stopping you from building an old-fashioned single-pass compiler, if compile time is your only concern. The code it generates just wouldn't be very good.
There is nothing stopping you from building an old-fashioned single-pass compiler, if compile time is your only concern. The code it generates just wouldn't be very good.
This highly depends on the language and your skill as a compiler writer. You can write a single pass assembler that generates great code but you have to of course write the low level code yourself (including manual register assignment). To do decent automatic register assignment, I agree you need at least two passes, but not 10 or more.