Code generation via machine learning
Commercial compiler implementors have to produce compilers that are capable of being used on a typical developer computer. A whole bunch of optimization techniques were known for years but could not be...
View ArticleAssuming compilers are clever enough (part 1)
Developers often assume the compiler they use will do all sorts of fancy stuff for them. Is this because they are lazy and happy to push responsibility for parts of the code they write on to the...
View ArticleWhy does Intel sell compilers?
Intel is a commercial company and the obvious answer to the question of why it sells compilers is: to make money. Does a company that makes billions of dollars in profits really have any interest in...
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Fibonacci and JIT compilers
To maximize a compiler’s ability to generate high quality code many programming language standards do not specify the order in which the operands of a binary operator are evaluated. Most of the time...
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Compiler benchmarking for the 21st century
I would like to propose a new way of measuring the quality of a compiler’s code generator: The highest quality compiler is one that generates identical code for all programs that produce the same...
View ArticleEstimating the reliability of compiler subcomponent
Compiler stress testing can be used for more than finding bugs in compilers, it can also be used to obtain information about the reliability of individual components of a compiler. A recent blog post...
View ArticleGo faster R for Google’s summer of code 2012
The R Foundation has been accepted for Google’s summer of code and I thought I would suggest a few ideas for projects. My interests are in optimization and source code analysis, so obviously the...
View ArticleAn academic programming language paper about R
The R language has passed another milestone, a paper aimed at the academic programming language community (or at least one section of this community) has been written about it, Evaluating the Design of...
View ArticleWhy does Coverity restrict who can see its tool output?
Coverity generate a lot of publicity from their contract (started under a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, don’t know if things have changed) to scan large quantities of open...
View ArticleSuperoptimizers are back in vogue
There has always been the need for a few developer with in-depth knowledge of a particular cpu architecture to sit down and think very hard about how best to implement a snippet of code performing some...
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