There are many optimizations that can be applied while translating Icon programs. These optimizations and the analyses needed to apply them are of interest for two reasons. First, Icon's unique combination of characteristics requires developing new techniques for implementing them. Second, these optimizations are used in variety of languages and Icon can be used as a medium for extending the state of the art. Many of these optimizations require detailed control of the generated code. Previous production implementations of the Icon programming language have been interpreters. The virtual machine code of an interpreter is seldom flexible enough to accommodate these optimizations and modifying the virtual machine to add the flexibility destroys the simplicity that justified using an interpreter in the first place. These optimizations can only reasonably be implemented in a compiler. In order to explore these optimizations for Icon programs, a compiler was developed. This dissertation describes the compiler and the optimizations it employs. It also describes a run-time system designed to support the analyses and optimizations. Icon variables are untyped. The compiler contains a type inferencing system that determines what values variables and expression may take on during program execution. This system is effective in the presence of values with pointer semantics and of assignments to components of data structures. The compiler stores intermediate results in temporary variables rather than on a stack. A simple and efficient algorithm was developed for determining the lifetimes of intermediate results in the presence of goal-directed evaluation. This allows an efficient allocation of temporary variables to intermediate results. The compiler uses information from type inferencing and liveness analysis to simplify generated code. Performance measurements on a variety of Icon programs show these optimizations to be effective.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2007. / Principal faculty advisor: Guang R. Gao, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Includes bibliographical references.

The research presented in this thesis is about the design and implementation of Naira, a parallel, parallelising compiler for a rich, purely functional programming language. The source language of the compiler is a subset of Haskell 1.2. The front end of Naira is written entirely in the Haskell subset being compiled. Naira has been successfully parallelised and it is the largest successfully parallelised Haskell program having achieved good absolute speedups on a network of SUN workstations. Having the same basic structure as other production compilers of functional languages, Naira's parallelisation technology should carry forward to other functional language compilers. The back end of Naira is written in C and generates parallel code in the C language which is envisioned to be run on distributed-memory machines. The code generator is based on a novel compilation scheme specified using a restricted form of Milner's 7r-calculus which achieves asynchronous communication. We present the first working implementation of this scheme on distributed-memory message-passing multicomputers with split-phase transactions. Simulated assessment of the generated parallel code indicates good parallel behaviour. Parallelism is introduced using explicit, advisory user annotations in the source' program and there are two major aspects of the use of annotations in the compiler. First, the front end of the compiler is parallelised so as to improve its efficiency at compilation time when it is compiling input programs. Secondly, the input programs to the compiler can themselves contain annotations based on which the compiler generates the multi-threaded parallel code. These, therefore, make Naira, unusually and uniquely, both a parallel and a parallelising compiler. We adopt a medium-grained approach to granularity where function applications form the unit of parallelism and load distribution. We have experimented with two different task distribution strategies, deterministic and random, and have also experimented with thread-based and quantum- based scheduling policies. Our experiments show that there is little efficiency difference for regular programs but the quantum-based scheduler is the best in programs with irregular parallelism. The compiler has been successfully built, parallelised and assessed using both idealised and realistic measurement tools: we obtained significant compilation speed-ups on a variety of simulated parallel architectures. The simulated results are supported by the best results obtained on real hardware for such a large program: we measured an absolute speedup of 2.5 on a network of 5 SUN workstations. The compiler has also been shown to have good parallelising potential, based on popular test programs. Results of assessing Naira's generated unoptimised parallel code are comparable to those produced by other successful parallel implementation projects.

This dissertation describes a system that constructs efficient, retargetable code generators and optimizers. chop reads nonprocedural descriptions of a computer's instruction set and of a naive code generator for the computer, and it writes an integrated code generator and peephole optimizer for it. The resulting code generators are very efficient because they interpret no tables; they are completely hard-coded. Nor do they build complex data structures to communicate between code generation and optimization phases. Interphase communication is reduced to the point that the code generator's output is often encoded in the program counter and conveyed to the optimizer by jumping to the right label. chop's code generator and optimizer are based on a very simple formalism, namely rewriting rules. An instrumented version of the compiler infers the optimization rules as it complies a training suite, and it records them for translation into hard code and inclusion into the production version. I have replaced the Portable C Compiler's code generator with one generated by chop. Despite a costly interface, the resulting compiler runs 30% to 50% faster than the original Portable C Compiler (pcc) and generates comparable code. This figure is diluted by common lexical analysis, parsing, and semantic analysis and by comparable code emission. Allowing for these, the new code generator appears to run approximately seven times faster than that of the original pcc.

Tse Tin-wah. / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1988. / Bibliography: leaves [73]-[78]

Zhang, Qirun. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-186). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts also in Chinese.

Bibliography: leaves 136-153. Investigates techniques to achieve performance improvement in Very Long Instruction Word machines through predicated execution.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-77). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Not available

Bibliography: leaves 136-153. / xiv, 153 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Investigates techniques to achieve performance improvement in Very Long Instruction Word machines through predicated execution. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2000