Having 300 students a year implement a compiler is a debatable enterprise, since the industry will certainly not recruit them for this competence. Yet we made that decision five years ago, for reasons not related to compiler construction. We detail these motivations, the resulting compiler design, and how we manage the assignment. The project meets its goals, since the majority of former students invariably refer to it as the project that taught them the most.

Compiler construction is a widely used software engineering exercise, but because most students will not be compiler writers, care must be taken to make it relevant in a core curriculum. Auxiliary tools, such as generators and interpreters, often hinder the learning: students have to fight tool idiosyncrasies, mysterious errors, and other poorly educative issues. We introduce a set of tools especially designed or improved for compiler construction educative projects in C ++ . We also provide suggestions about new approaches to compiler construction. We draw guidelines from our experience to make tools suitable for education purposes.