SableVM is a free/Free spec-compliant and extensible JVM. It includes a JIT for PPC, SPARC and x86, but runs on several more architectures. It supports several different interpreter dispatch models (switched, threaded, inlined) and has an efficient runtime system. It is implemented in C with extensive use of M4 macros.
Machine SUIF is “a flexible, extensible, and usable infrastructure for constructing compiler back ends.” Most notably, Machine SUIF provides a way to generate code for x86, IA-64, or Alpha from SUIF code, as well as “libraries for control- and data-flow analysis, and passes for register allocation, instruction scheduling, scalar optimization, and code layout.” The optimizations supplied by Machine SUIF are implemented on top of a substrate-independent API — therefore, one can use Machine SUIF optimizations in other compiler infrastructures by re-implementing an API. Furthermore, target-specific information to be used by low-level optimizations is supplied by dynamically-linked libraries, allowing the possibility of portable low-level optimization code.
The alto project from Arizona is a whole-program, link-time optimizer for the DEC Alpha, enabling optimization and specialization of library routines to their call sites.
Thanks to Manoj Plakal for the link.
Manoj Plakal points out that I have not mentioned GCC. GCC, of course, has frontends for many languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Fortran, Pascal, and Ada; and backends for nearly every computer architecture ever created as well as a great many that weren’t. It has a reputation for being difficult to use for research, but that hasn’t stopped many people from doing so.
Feel free to TrackBack this entry if you’re using GCC for programming languages research, or if you have tips for using GCC for programming languages research.
C–– is a “portable assembly language” — a target language for compiler backends that can compile into native code on several platforms. It is implemented in OCaml and appears sufficiently general to handle a wide range of language features: for example, all values are untyped strings of bits, multiple return values are possible, and tail call optimization is readily available. C–– also supports a run-time interface, so that one may use implementations of support code that are most suitable for a given language.
There are code generators for x86, PPC, IA-64, SPARC, MIPS, ARM, and Alpha. According to the web page, as of July 2003, the x86 backend is reasonably mature, whereas the rest are under development.
Thanks to Kent Hunter for the pointer.
MLRISC is a configurable compiler back-end that supports generating code for Alpha, PA-RISC, Sparc, x86, PowerPC, MIPS, and TI C6x processors. The MLRISC intermediate representation, target instruction set, flowgraph, and optimization suite are all parameterizable, so that a front-end can specialize each to produce the most suitable backend for a given language. The system is implemented in ML and is used by several compilers, including:
Thanks to Kent Hunter for the pointer.
