Lambda the Ultimate

The paper:

Resourceable, Retargetable, Modular Instruction Selection Using a Machine-Independent, Type-Based Tiling of Low-Level Intermediate Code

Ramsey and Dias have a series of papers about making it ever easier to generate compiler backends, and the claim is that they produce decent code to boot. I wonder if this stuff has/will show up in compilers I can use? (Or, do you think it not actually matter, for some pragmatic reason or other?)

Abstract: We present a novel variation on the standard technique of selecting instructions by tiling an intermediate-code tree. Typical compilers use a different set of tiles for every target machine. By analyzing a formal model of machine-level computation, we have developed a set of tiles that is machine-independent while retaining the expressive power of machine code. Using this tileset, we reduce the number of tilers required from one per machine to one per architectural family (e.g., register architecture or stack architecture). Because the tiler is the part of the instruction selector that is most difficult to reason about, our technique makes it possible to retarget an instruction selector with significantly less effort than standard techniques. Retargeting effort is further reduced by applying an earlier result which generates the machine-dependent implementation of our tileset automatically from a declarative description of instructions' semantics. Our design has the additional benefit of enabling modular reasoning about three aspects of code generation that are not typically separated: the semantics of the compiler's intermediate representation, the semantics of the target instruction set, and the techniques needed to generate good target code.