My group chose to work on the Gleam compiler, written in Rust. I have no experience in Gleam, Rust, or compilers, so why would I ever agree to this? My reasoning is similar to that of my last blog: learning comes from working on new things - things I haven’t seen before. How can I plan to be a great software engineer and know absolutely nothing about compilers? A project like this will at least force me to learn the basics. Unfortunately, the volume is certainly going to make life uncomfortable, and taking a Programming Languages class at the same time where we study Ada, ML, Scheme, Scala, and Java isn’t exactly helpful either. Nonetheless, I’ve made a plan to get started. I will work through Building an Interpreter in Go by Thorsten Ball, read the Gleam Language Tour, and read the Rust Programming Language. It was quite funny that my group was originally made up of people who chose niche topics/projects. In other words, no one was interested in distributed systems specifically, but luckily, one of my group members David did also have a general interest in low-level/backend work. It’s also convenient that David has taken classes on compilers and knows Rust, so I have someone to ask questions.