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Automatically Generating Instruction Selectors Using Declarative Machine Descriptions by João Dias; Norman Ramsey is a Computer Science article available to read on EtoBox.

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Despite years of work on retargetable compilers, creating a good, reliable back end for an optimizing compiler still entails a lot of hard work. Moreover, a critical component of the back end---the instruction selector---must be written by a person who is expert in both the compiler's intermediate code and the target machine's instruction set. By __generating__ the instruction selector from declarative machine descriptions we have (a) made it unnecessary for one person to be both a compiler expert and a machine expert, and (b) made creating an optimizing back end easier than ever before. Our achievement rests on two new results. First, finding a mapping from intermediate code to machine code is an undecidable problem. Second, using heuristic search, we can find mappings for machines of practical interest in at most a few minutes of CPU time. Our most significant new idea is that heuristic search should be controlled by algebraic laws. Laws are used not only to show when a sequence of instructions implements part of an intermediate code, but also to limit the search: we drop a sequence of instructions not when it gets too long or when it computes too complicated a result, but when _

Who reads Automatically Generating Instruction Selectors Using Declarative Machine Descriptions?

Author

João Dias; Norman Ramsey

Publisher

ACM

Published

2010

Language

EN

Field

Computer Science (Physical Sciences)