Re: Compiler Construction Tools?

Just a note on SUIF:


It has not been designed as a front end tool: there are plenty of
those. It is a very flexible middle end and back end generator. I
was surprised to see how many papers at PLDI referred to SUIF as their
backend generator.


SUIF 1(.2?) is the version that I am most familiar with.
Supplied front ends to SUIF 1 are limited: it uses lcc as a front end
for C and uses Fortran to C translation followed by lcc to front end
Fortran. Other front ends may be used but you have to write them
yourself.


SUIF 1 is written without regard to compile time: individual passes
typically read input from a file ad write output to a file.


SUIF 1 is an excellent product for teaching courses on optimizing
compilers, because of the ease of introducing new passes.


SUIF 2 is in development, but is (pre?) released.
SUIF 2 fixes the read / unpickle / transform / pickle / write overhead
of SUIF 1 by putting in generalized piping between passes which may be
implemented in memory with low overhead. I believe that there are C++
and Java fromt ends for SUIF 2 in development.


For the SUIF package, please see http://suif.stanford.edu/ the
Stanford product is mostly concerned with middle end issues such as
parallelization.


For an associated product: machSUIF, please see
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/hube/ the Harvard product is code
generation, register allocation, scheduling passes for SUIF, as well
as optimization passes that can be used at the machine code level.


-- Allyn
--

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