Prof Palsberg is an excellent professor for this class.

The projects are the main course of this class, during the quarter you will progressively be building a compiler for the language Palsberg has designed for the class. Palsberg seems to have put in a large amount of work in making these projects seem interesting and building a programming framework for them, but they will be difficult and time consuming, building a compiler isn't done over a weekend.

Do keep in mind deadlines for these projects are hard deadlines however, in sharp contrast to much of the rest of the CS department. If you are a minute late like I was, you get 0 on a project. The projects aren't horribly difficult but very very time consuming, this combined with this hard deadline is a recipe for disaster.

That said, his grading is nice, he uses an autograder for grading with immediate feedback and unlimited submissions, you can submit, see your score, and tweak your program, and submit again for no penalty.

Unlike other classes, Palsberg times his lectures even better than the rest of the CS department. While professors like Eggert have a habit of assigning complicated homeworks and not lecturing about them until the day before they are due, Palsberg basically finished all the lectures needed to do all 5 projects by week 6 of the quarter, spending the rest of the time discussing various other topics in compilers and optimization.

Prof Palsberg is generally a good lecturer, and adapted well for the 2020 covid season.

Exams are free from my understanding, this seems to be by Palsberg's design as he himself said they were meant as a grade boost due to hard projects. On top of a midterm and a final, there were multiple quizzes on ccle for latter topics in the class, which were multiple choice and had unlimited submission attempts, so you could just try and try again until you passed the quiz. The final had many questions literally copied from the exam and was open note, so if you printed the quizzes for the final as notes you got free points.

workload-wise I think it's more than 111 and less than 131. do not underestimate the homeworks. they are very involved, though I wouldn't say the concepts themselves are difficult. discussion and office hours are helpful.

tests are very easy if you know how to do the homework. the professor is nice. overall it's a good class if you have some interest in compilers.