Step 1: maybe read a book or two on the rough theory, for orientation.
Step 2: tinker around on a mid-sized open source one, fix a few little bugs, see if it suits your taste.
Step 3: apply to a company that ships a compiler.
(Apple is hiring, fwiw!)
Conversation
Do you have any book suggestions?
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I haven't done an exhaustive comparison but I usually recommend starting with Appel (cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/), Scott (elsevier.com/books/programm) and Pierce (cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/).
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For more detail, I recommend Harper (cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl.html) for types, Jones (cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/r) for GC, Levine for linkers (linker.iecc.com) and while I haven't read it, I've heard good things about Muchnick (goodreads.com/book/show/8879) for optimization and codegen.
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Kind of wish there were more resources out there for incremental and query driven compilation, but I guess folks are still figuring that stuff out. Bit hard to write a textbook yet!
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Im kind of a bit afraid of going too deep into building my backend before I can figure out how to incrementalise stuff... 😰
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Here is what I’ve collected so far - not sure if you have any more ideas?
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Hey, I said I'd do it by the end of the month. I'm just busy bikeshedding about whether to use an existing wiki for that or build my own :P
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That's cool, that's where I get stuck with wikis too.
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Ugh, I know the feels. Atm I’m bike shedding on what static site generator to use for pikelet...
I normally just go with the first one that has docs in a format I like ngl
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So far it's between Vuepress and Docusaurus. Vuepress looks prettier, but Docusaurus has better versioning support and a cute dinosaur logo.