I read the first volume, and had two main reactions. The first was that the insight into the structure of tools like Asterix and Audacity and bash was fascinating. The second was that there is not really any common sense of what is "architecture" in software, and what is something else.

I am going to require job candidates to read one of these and discuss it with me.

Those books are seriously excellent. As a FP nerd I particularly enjoyed the GHC entry.

The entry on Warp in "The Performance of Open Source Applications" was similarly fascinating.

http://aosabook.org/en/posa/warp.html

Wow, I didn't even notice this chapter... Thanks!

The architecture of LLVM heavily reminds me of Gallium. API State trackers (GL, D3D) are front-ends, HW drivers are back-ends, and the isolated IR in the middle.

I don't find that very surprising. It's basically one of the basic compiler models.

Funny you should say that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium3D#LLVM_usage