Understanding Programs Using Graphs

You may have heard that a compiler uses a data structure called an abstract-syntax-tree, or AST, when it parses your program, but it’s less common knowledge that an AST is normally used just at the very start of compilation, and a powerful compiler generally uses a more advanced type of data structure as its intermediate representation to optimize your program and translate it to machine code in the later phases of compilation. In the case of TruffleRuby, the just-in-time compiler for Ruby that ...