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UCSD CSE 231 (Sp24)

Crew

  • Ranjit Jhala (Instructor)
  • Nico Lehmann (TA, 🦀)
  • Matthew Kolosick (TA)
  • Michael Borkowski (TA)

(with many thanks to Joe Politz from whom much of this material is gratefully borrowed!)

Basics - Resources - Schedule - Staff - Grading - Policies

In this course, we'll explore the implementation of compilers: programs that transform source programs into other useful, executable forms. This will include understanding syntax and its structure, checking for and representing errors in programs, writing programs that generate code, and the interaction of generated code with a runtime system.

We will explore these topics interactively in lecure, you will implement an increasingly sophisticated series of compilers throughout the course to learn how different language features are compiled, and you will think through design challenges based on what you learn from implementation.

This web page serves as the main source of announcements and resources for the course, as well as the syllabus.

Basics

  • Lecture: Center 105 Tu-Th 2:00-3:20pm
  • Discussion: CENTER 212 Fr 2:00-2:50pm
  • Exams: (In Friday Discussion Section) May 3 (Week 5), May 31 (Week 9)
  • Final Exam: (Optional, to make up exam credit) Tue June 11, 3:00-6:00pm (CENTER 105)
  • Podcasts: podcast.ucsd.edu
  • Q&A Forum: Piazza
  • Gradescope: https://www.gradescope.com

Office Hours

  • Ranjit (Thu 1pm - 2pm in CSE 3110)
  • Michael (Fri 4pm - 5pm in CSE 3217)
  • Nico (Thu 10am-11am https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/98350873892, Fri 10am-11am CSE 240A)
  • Matt (Wed 10am-12pm https://ucsd.zoom.us/j/2499498988)

Resources

Textbook/readings: There's no official textbook, but we will link to different online resources for you to read to supplement lecture. Versions of this course have been taught at several universities, so sometimes I'll link to those instructors' materials as well.

Some useful resources are:

Schedule

The schedule below outlines topics, due dates, and links to assignments. The schedule of lecture topics might change slightly, but I post a general plan so you can know roughly where we are headed.

The typical due dates are that assignments and quizzes are due Friday evenings.

Week 10 - Register Allocation

Week 9 - GC / Type Inference

Week 8 - GC / Type Inference

Week 7 - Garbage Collection

Week 6 - Closures

Week 5 - Tail Calls and the Heap

Week 4 - Functions and Calling Conventions

Week 3 - Tags, Conditionals, and Loops

Week 2 - Binary Operators, Booleans, and Conditionals

Week 1 - Rust and Source to Assembly Conversion

Staff

Office hours are concentrated on Wed, Thu, Fri, since most assignments are due Friday evening. Please check the calendar before you come in case there have been any changes. When you come to the office hour, we may ask you to put your name in the queue using the whiteboard. Read the description about collaboration below for some context about office hours. The office hours schedule is below; each event has details about remote/in-person:

Grading

Your grade will be calculated from assignments, exams, participation and quizzes.

Assignments are given periodically, typically at one or two week intervals. On each you'll get a score from 0-3 (Incomplete/No Pass, Low Pass, Pass, High Pass).

There are two exams in the course, one in week 5 and one in week 9, given in the Friday discussion sections. Tests also get a score from 0-3. Finals week and the usual final exam block will give an opportunity to make up credit on these if you miss them or get low scores.

For the participation credit, most lectures will come with a 1-2 page handout, and you can submit the handout any time up until the start of the next lecture. Credit is given for reasonable effort in engaging with the notes from the day on the handout.

Quizzes will release each week around Wednesday, and be due Sunday evening. These serve as a review of the past week and a preview of the coming week.

The standards for grade levels are:

  • A:

    • Exam point total 5 or higher (High Pass on one exam and Pass or better on the other) (including final make-up)
    • One of:
      • High Pass on half the assignments, Pass on others, no missing assignments
      • High Pass on 4 of 5 assignments from (diamondback, egg-eater, fer-de-lance, gardener, harlequin) assignments.
      • High Pass on 3 of 5 assignments from (diamondback, egg-eater, fer-de-lance, gardener, harlequin) and High Pass in both midterms.

  • B:

    • Exam point total 4 or higher (one High Pass and one Low Pass, or two Passes) (including final make-up)
    • One of:
      • Pass or above on all assignments, up to one missing assignment
      • High pass on one assignment from (boa, cobra, diamondback) and High pass on two assignments from (egg-eater, fer-de-lance, gardener, harlequin).

  • C

    • Exam point total 3 or higher (including final make-up)
    • Pass or above on half the assignments, any score on the others

You get credit for a quiz by getting most of the questions right.

Engagement is used to add +/- modifiers at the end of the quarter, and won't make the difference between A/B/C etc.

Comprehensive Exam: For graduate students using this course for a comprehensive exam requirement, you must get "A" achievement on the exams. Note that you can use the final exam make-up time to do this!

Policies

Programming

In your professional programming life, some of your work will be highly collaborative with lots of expert advice available from senior developers and from sites like StackOverflow. This is a common case in many Web-focused companies, in academia, and on open-source projects. It’s a great way to get exposed to new techniques, share knowledge, and generally enjoy teamwork. In contrast, some of your work will involve figuring out programming problems on your own, where you are the first person to encounter an issue, or the first person to try using a new library in the context of your application. You should get experience in both types of situations; we might call the former kind of process open to collaboration and the latter closed to collaboration.

In terms of courses, this split also makes sense. Programming assignments serve (at least) two roles. First and foremost, they are a mechanism for you to learn! By directly applying the techniques and skills we discuss in class, you get practice and become a better programmer. Second, they are an assessment mechanism – as instructional staff we use them to evaluate your understanding of concepts as demonstrated by your programs. Open collaboration can reduce frustration while learning and give you chances to enjoy collaboration and lots of help, but may not let us accurately evaluate your understanding. Closed assignments are an opportunity for you to demonstrate what you know by way of programming (and some of the frustration of working through a problem on your own is healthy frustration).

There are two types of assignments in this course:

  • Open collaboration assignments, for which you can talk to anyone else in the course, post snippets of code online, get lots of help from TAs, and generally come up with solutions collaboratively. TAs will be happy to look at your code and suggest fixes, along with explaining them. There are a few restrictions:

    • Any code that you didn't write must be cited in the README file that goes along with your submission
      • Example: On an open collaboration assignment, you and another student chat online about the solution, you figure out a particular helper method together. Your README should say “The FOO function was developed in collaboration with Firstname Lastname”
      • Example: On an open collaboration assignment, a student posts the compilation strategy they used to handle a type of expression you were struggling with. Your README should say “I used the code from the forum post at [link]”
    • Anyone you work with in-person must be noted in your README
      • Example: You and another student sit next to each other in the lab, and point out mistakes and errors to one another as you work through the assignment. As a result, your solutions are substantially similar. Your README should say “I collaborated with Firstname Lastname to develop my solution.”
    • You cannot share publicly your entire repository of code or paste an entire solution into a message board. Keep snippets to reasonable, descriptive chunks of code; think a dozen lines or so to get the point across.
    • You still cannot use whole solutions that you find online (though copy-paste from Stack Overflow, tutorials etc, if you need help with Rust patterns, etc.) You shouldn't get assistance or code from students outside of this offering of the class. All the code that is handed in should be developed by you or someone in the class.
    • If you can get ChatGPT, Copilot, or another LLM to generate code that works for the course, feel free, but you must put comments in your code describing the prompt you used to get it if you do. If you have Copilot on, put a comment if it generates an entire method or match case.

    This doesn’t mean the staff will be handing out answers. We’ll mostly respond with leading questions and advice, and you shouldn’t expect a direct answer to questions like “am I done?” or “is my code right?”

    There is no guarantee the assistance you get from your classmates is correct. It is your responsibility to use your judgment to avoid using an idea on the course message board that is wrong, or doesn’t work with your solution; we won’t necessarily tell you one way or another while the assignment is out.

    If we see that you used code from other students and didn’t cite it in the README, the penalty will range from a point deduction to an academic integrity violation, depending on the severity. Always cite your work!

  • Closed collaboration assignments, where you cannot collaborate with others. You can ask clarification questions as private posts or of TAs. However, TAs will not look at your code or comment on it. Lab/office hours these weeks are for conceptual questions or for questions about past assignments only, no code assistance. On these assignments:

    • You cannot look at or use anyone else's code for the assignment
    • You cannot discuss the assignment with other students
    • You cannot post publicly about the assignment on the course message board (or on social media or other forums). Of course, you can still post questions about material from lecture or past assignments!
    • All of the examples in the open collaboration section above would be academic integrity violations on a closed collaboration assignment except for using tutorials/LLMs. If you use code from tutorials/Stack Overflow/LLMs, cite them as described above.

You can always use code from class or shared by the instructional team (properly attributed).

Programming assignments will explicitly list whether they are open or closed collaboration.

You should be familiar with the UCSD guidelines on academic integrity as well.

Late Work

You have a total of six late days that you can use throughout the quarter, but no more than four late days per assignment.

  • A late day means anything between 1 second and 23 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds past a deadline
  • If you submit past the late day limit, you get 0 points for that assignment
  • There is no penalty for submitting late but within the limit

Regrades

Mistakes occur in grading. Once grades are posted for an assignment, we will allow a short period for you to request a fix (announced along with grade release). If you don't make a request in the given period, the grade you were initially given is final.

Exams

There will be two exams during the quarter (held in discussion section) and a final exam. There are no make-up exams for the tests during the quarter. However, the final exam will have sections that correspond to each of the in-class exams, and if your score on that part of the final is higher than your score on that in-class exam, the exam score replaces it. This includes the case where you miss an in-class exam (scoring a 0), but can regain credit from that part of the final exam. This policy is designed to encourage you to treat the in-class exams as learning opportunities so that you can study any mistakes you make and re-apply that knowledge on the final.

In addition, if you score high enough on the exams during the quarter, you can skip the final exam with no penalty and just have the exam grades applied as your exam score.

You are not allowed any study aids on exams, aside from those pertaining to university-approved accommodations. References will be provided along with exams to avoid unnecessary memorization.

You cannot discuss the content of exams with others in the course until grades have been released for that exam.

Some past exams are available at the link below for reference on format (content changes from offering to offering so this may not be representative):

Laptop/Device Policy in Lecture

There are lots of great reasons to have a laptop, tablet, or phone open during class. You might be taking notes, getting a photo of an important moment on the board, trying out a program that we're developing together, and so on. The main issue with screens and technology in the classroom isn't your own distraction (which is your responsibility to manage), it's the distraction of other students. Anyone sitting behind you cannot help but have your screen in their field of view. Having distracting content on your screen can really harm their learning experience.

With this in mind, the device policy for the course is that if you have a screen open, you either:

  • Have only content onscreen that's directly related to the current lecture.
  • Have unrelated content open and sit in one of the back two rows of the room to mitigate the effects on other students. I may remind you of this policy if I notice you not following it in class. Note that I really don't mind if you want to sit in the back and try to multi-task in various ways while participating in lecture (I may not recommend it, but it's your time!)

Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to fostering a learning environment for this course that supports a diversity of thoughts, perspectives and experiences, and respects your identities (including race, ethnicity, heritage, gender, sex, class, sexuality, religion, ability, age, educational background, etc.). Our goal is to create a diverse and inclusive learning environment where all students feel comfortable and can thrive.

Our instructional staff will make a concerted effort to be welcoming and inclusive to the wide diversity of students in this course. If there is a way we can make you feel more included please let one of the course staff know, either in person, via email/discussion board, or even in a note under the door. Our learning about diverse perspectives and identities is an ongoing process, and we welcome your perspectives and input.

We also expect that you, as a student in this course, will honor and respect your classmates, abiding by the UCSD Principles of Community (https://ucsd.edu/about/principles.html). Please understand that others’ backgrounds, perspectives and experiences may be different than your own, and help us to build an environment where everyone is respected and feels comfortable.

If you experience any sort of harassment or discrimination, please contact the instructor as soon as possible. If you prefer to speak with someone outside of the course, please contact the Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination: https://ophd.ucsd.edu/.