High-Level Information - An Approach for Integrating Front-End and Back-End Compilers

We propose a new universal High-Level Information (HLI) format to effectively integrate front-end and back-end compilers by passing front-end information to the back-end compiler. Importing this information into an existing backend leverages the state-of-the-art analysis and transformation capabilities of existing front-end compilers to allow the back-end greater optimization potential than it has when relying on only locally-extracted information. A version of the HLI has been implemented in the SUIF parallelizing compiler and the GCC back-end compiler. Experimental results with the SPEC benchmarks show that HLI can provide GCC with substantially more accurate data dependence information than it can obtain on its own. Our results show that the number of dependence edges in GCC can be reduced by an average of 48% for the integer benchmark programs and an average of 54% for the floating-point benchmark programs studied, which provides greater flexibility to GCC's code scheduling p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ICPP
• Authors: Sangyeun Cho, Jenn-Yuan Tsai, Yonghong Song, Bixia Zheng, Stephen J. Schwinn, Xin Wang, Qing Zhao, Zhiyuan Li, David J. Lilja, Pen-Chung Yew
• Keywords: Back-end Compiler, Back-end Greater Optimization, Distributed And Parallel Computing, GCC Back-end Compiler, ICPP 1998