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Developing an optimizing compiler for the game boy as a software engineering project

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Software engineering students not only have to learn theoretical concepts but also how to successfully apply them in practice. Hence, projects are an important part of software engineering curricula. As software engineering methods and technologies are only relevant for non-trivial software systems, we report in this paper on a master-level software engineering project course in which a team of students developed a compiler for the Game Boy in a single semester. The students developed different languages and corresponding parsers to a common intermediate language, optimizations on the intermediate language, as well as a code generator for the Game Boy. We particularly present lessons learned by us and the students as well as potential course improvements.

References

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2017. Emulicious (Game Boy {.} Emulator). (2017). Retrieved October 4, 2017 from http://emulicious.net (Author: Michael Stegmaier).
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Alexander Aiken. 1996. Cool: A portable project for teaching compiler construction. ACM Sigplan Notices 31, 7 (1996), 19--24.
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James S Daley. 1978. A laboratory approach to teaching compiler writing. In ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 10. ACM, 19--21.
[4]
Marjan Mernik and Viljem Zumer. 2003. An educational tool for teaching compiler construction. IEEE Transactions on Education 46, 1 (2003), 61--68.
[5]
Julie E Mills, David F Treagust, and others. 2003. Engineering education---Is problem-based or project-based learning the answer. Australasian journal of engineering education 3, 2 (2003), 2--16.
[6]
Shimon Schocken, Noam Nisan, and Michal Armoni. 2009. A synthesis course in hardware architecture, compilers, and software engineering. In ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, Vol. 41. ACM, 443--447.

Cited By

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  • (2023)Teaching Language Processing with the PAMOJA FrameworkScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2023.102959(102959)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2021)Experience report on soft and project skills building through repetitionProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Education through Advanced Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence10.1145/3472673.3473959(9-14)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2021

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICSE-SEET '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training
May 2018
187 pages
ISBN:9781450356602
DOI:10.1145/3183377
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 May 2018

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Author Tags

  1. compiler construction
  2. project-based learning
  3. software engineering education

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Teaching Language Processing with the PAMOJA FrameworkScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2023.102959(102959)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2021)Experience report on soft and project skills building through repetitionProceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Education through Advanced Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence10.1145/3472673.3473959(9-14)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2021

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