Compiler - History

History

Software for early computers was primarily written in assembly language. Higher level programming languages were not invented until the benefits of being able to reuse software on different kinds of CPUs started to become significantly greater than the costs of writing a compiler. The limited memory capacity of early computers led to substantial technical challenges when designing the first compilers.

Towards the end of the 1950s machine-independent programming languages were first proposed. Subsequently several experimental compilers were developed. The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper, in 1952, for the A-0 programming language. The FORTRAN team led by John Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first complete compiler in 1957. COBOL was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, in 1960.

In many application domains the idea of using a higher level language quickly caught on. Because of the expanding functionality supported by newer programming languages and the increasing complexity of computer architectures, compilers have become more complex.

Early compilers were written in assembly language. The first self-hosting compiler — capable of compiling its own source code in a high-level language — was created in 1962 for Lisp by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT. Since the 1970s it has become common practice to implement a compiler in the language it compiles, although both Pascal and C have been popular choices for implementation language. Building a self-hosting compiler is a bootstrapping problem—the first such compiler for a language must be compiled either by hand or by a compiler written in a different language, or (as in Hart and Levin's Lisp compiler) compiled by running the compiler in an interpreter.