Interesting Post about Microsoft’s C# Compiler

One of the guys from the C# compiler team at Microsoft posted this article about how their C# compiler goes about parsing source code and emitting an assembly. Whereas C and C++ are a single pass, the C# compiler does dozens of passes. Somehow csc seems to do this much faster than cl or gcc would compile a comparable body of C/C++. I suspect the multiple passes also help the compiler to emit really good error messages.

Fascinating stuff.