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Rino Di Paola
Rino Di Paola

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How I Built a Mini C Compiler to Understand How Compilers Work

I’ve always been fascinated by how programming languages are transformed into executable code.

As a software engineer, I use compilers every day — but I realized I had never really understood what happens behind the scenes.

To change that, I decided to build a Mini C Compiler from scratch, focusing on learning rather than performance or completeness.

The goal was simple: understand how each stage of a compiler works — from lexical analysis to parsing and interpreting — and document everything clearly.

The project supports a basic subset of the C language and runs through an interpreter to execute the code.

While it’s far from a production-grade compiler, it gave me a much clearer picture of how real compilers like GCC or Clang are structured internally.

I tried to make the documentation as clear as possible so that anyone else interested in learning these concepts can follow the same path I did.

🧩 Repository and documentation:

https://github.com/ironrinox/mini-c-compiler

If you’re a beginner or a curious developer looking to understand compilers in a more practical way, I hope this project can be a useful reference.

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