Re: Are there "compiler generators"?

Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> writes:
>Are there compiler generators?


Apart from scanner generators and parser generators, there are also:


* generators of attribute grammar evaluators (e.g., Ox). They use an
    attribute grammar as input.


* generators of instruction selectors (e.g., burg and friends). Burg
    uses a tree grammar as input.


* generators of virtual machine interpreters and other code dealing
    with virtual machine instructions (e.g., vmgen). Vmgen uses a
    description of the virtual machine instructions as inputs.


* There is also some work on generating type checkers.


All of these could be classified as non-procedural, although they tend
to include some procedural code.


You need to add substantial amounts of glue code to integrate the
pieces generated by these generators into a compiler, especially for
languages that do not quite fit in the generators' molds. Plus, there
are pieces such as symbol tables and register allocation that are not
covered by these generators.


I have also seen a paper by a French group (don't remember the names)
in the early 1990s where a generator could generate a complete Pascal
compiler from a specification. My impression, however, was that the
generator could only generate compilers for languages that are
relatively close to Pascal, and I saw no good way to make it much more
flexible.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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