A Catalog of Research Compiler Infrastructures and Tools

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.

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:

• Standard ML of New Jersey
• Church
• LGIC (a compiler for CHILL)
• The Moby Language
• MLRISC was also used in an early implementation of the C–– portable assembly language.

Thanks to Kent Hunter for the pointer.