I’m Thomas Zachary - a 19 y/o undergraduate at Imperial College London. I love functional programming, compilers, low-level programming, and computer architecture. I’m looking to dive into FPGAs and programming for custom hardware in 2026.
HardWACC: Building an HLS tool from scratch
Introduction At Imperial College London, second-year computing students tackle 3 big group projects: PintOS, WACC, and DRP. Each of these projects focus on developing different skills needed by a software engineer. WACC is a project where you make a compiler from scratch, and unlike the previous project (PintOS), you don’t have any skeleton or framework code to guide you. The specification is quite clear on what you have to do: write a compiler that compiles the WACC programming language. Other than that, there are not many restrictions on how you go about this task. ...