Lambda the Ultimate

Automatically Generating the Back End of a Compiler Using Declarative Machine Descriptions[PDF]
By Joao Dias

Although I have proven that the general problem is undecidable, I show how, for machines of practical interest, to generate the back end of a compiler.
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The largest machine-dependent component in a back end is the instruction
selector. Previous work has shown that it is difficult to generate a highquality
instruction selector. But by adopting the compiler architecture developed
by Davidson and Fraser (1984), I can generate a na¨ıve instruction
selector and rely upon a machine-independent optimizer to improve the machine
instructions. Unlike previous work, my generated back ends produce
code that is as good as the code produced by hand-written back ends.