Experience Report on Innovative Experiments for Compiler Course.

After five years of teaching of the Compiler Principle and Technology course, we realized that the conventional experiment setups had been lagging behind the fast evolution of modern compilers, and thus cannot fulfill the teaching objectives of helping students get trained for future practice in the related fields. To close the gap, the teaching group has designed a series of innovative experiments, which incorporate the advanced compilation techniques such as LLVM, RISC-V, etc., and follow four tracks, namely, the generation of back-end code, advanced optimizations of intermediate representation, extension of language features, and error diagnoses. To assess students’ creativity, we only give a minimum set of information, and expect students to find their own solutions. We deployed the innovative experiments in the fall semester of 2021, which were optional and complemented to the mandatory experiments. Our major findings are (1) though many students were interested in, only a small group of students submitted their projects; (2) more than half of participants delivered solutions much better than our expectation, and received high scores; and (3) the submitted projects revealed that students already knew how to apply the principles and techniques taught at class to their practice.