This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Rino Di Paola
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.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Rino Di Paola