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If a compiler's work is essentially translating source code into machine level code, can there be any glitch in a compiler, i.e. a faulty "translation?"
The same goes for an interpreter: can it fail to output the required content sometimes?
I have not heard of any bugs in compilers/interpreters, but do they exist?
You tend to find them more in languages that are actively being developed than in those that are relatively mature (and thus don't see a lot of change on a frequent basis). This is probably why most languages are released at various 'stages' of stability. A nightly build is far less likely to be stable than a release candidate, which itself is less likely to be stable than a fully released and actively used version.
Luckily most of these languages (especially those that are open source) will have a public bug tracking system that you can submit reports to.
In my own experience, I ran into a fairly obscure but severe bug in Scala on Windows. I submitted my findings to the bug tracker and the issue was fixed fairly quickly. In that case, the language developers were smart enough to include a helpful note in the error log output, suggesting that what I'd run into was in fact a compiler error, and said where to submit the report.
In layman's words:
All programs can have bugs.
Compilers are programs.
Ergo, compilers can have bugs.
There can bugs even in hardware; a famous example is the Pentium FDIV bug. Without doubt there is the possibility that the compilers contain bugs.
Compilers and interpreters are software too, and thus they aren't free from any of the problems of other software.
This is an example from a compiler as recent as MSVC 11 (2012), and here's an article on how they test the backend.
Of course, because compilers are software.
In 2005, I had a piece of code fail in a highly critical piece of software I had written for a large company. Since it cost the company literally millions of dollars to rectify, they of course launched a big-ass investigation.
Thankfully (from my perspective), the issue turned out to be a compiler issue in Delphi. In the try finally block, the return value of a function was destroyed, and resulted in absolutely random results back to the caller. This was documented, and acknowledged by Borland.
.NET was well known to have literally hundreds of different memory leaks, particularly in its early implementations.
I would contend that there is no such thing as bugless software. Compilers are no exception. They are, though, tested more thoroughly than most business software, and are consumed by smart, critical, contentious people, so their track record has actually, on the whole, been pretty good.
Not only bugs, but also deliberate malware.
The "login" trojan implemented by Brian Kernighan to the original Unix C compiler is the most well-known of these; the article http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html has some background on this.
Yes of course like any software compilers have bugs, for example the gcc bug list is here
Yes.
Also, not only with compilers, but also with Interpretors/debuggers, and any 3rd party software tool.
We are currently using some 3rd party software, and have been having some of the issue. Sometimes they thank us, for finding and reporting a bug. :)
Some of them have some memory leaks too, which leads to crash. The important question here could be, how to determine if the 3rd party tool, or the compiler has bugs for your application to work correctly?
Compiler is a program that reads a program written in one language (the source language) and translates it into an another equivalent program in another language (the target language), mostly machine language.
There are different phases of compiler through which your source language code is scanned line by line. There is a symbol table which keeps the track of all Keywords which are scanned for in source language code.
Phase 1 : Lexical Analyzer - reads all the character in source program and forms the logical separation of tokens (int, char, float, if-else,for,while etc.)
Phase 2 : Syntax Analyzer - analyze the structure of stream of tokens. Hierarchical parsing of expressions which includes postfix/prefix etc. (a=b+c*d)
Phase 3 : Semantic Analyzer - Type checking of tokens (integer to real, float etc.) and many things like operator precedence etc..
Phase 4 : Intermediate Code Generator - a=b+c*d-e(temp1=c*d, temp2=temp1+b, temp3=temp2-e)
Phase 5 : Code Optimization - Various Analysis (control flow, data flow, transformations)
which eleminates : Redundancy code, Constants propogation, Partial dead code,
common subexpression, Loop invariant code
Phase 6 : Code Generation - Generation of target code (Mostly Assembly Language) putting values in Registers
All these phases are nothing but well written programs and there could be N number of flaws in that..
Of course, compilers are just programms and their authors are idiots too :). Even language specification can have a bug. Example: c# + foreach + lambda.
Or in Python, bug in interpreter: Compiling evil ast crashes interpreter.
Well, if you want to look on bugs in compiler/interpeter -> look at php. There is a famous bug with integer overflow. First fix started from if (size > INT_MAX) return NULL;. Continuation of the story.
