4 lessons
What is a compiler, really?
Why "translating" is the entire idea behind a compiler, explained with a five-year-old's translator toy before a single line of C++ shows up.
Compilers vs interpreters vs "kind of both"
Why some languages translate everything upfront, others read and run line by line, and why most real languages today are secretly a mix of the two.
The six phases of a compiler, end to end
A bird's-eye map of every stage a compiler passes your code through, from raw characters to final machine instructions, using one tiny expression as the running example.
Bootstrapping: how do you compile a compiler's own language?
The chicken-and-egg puzzle of writing a compiler in the very language it compiles, solved with T-diagrams and the classic three-step bootstrap.