Compiling for Runtime Code Generation
Frederick Smith, Dan Grossman, Greg Morrisett, Luke Hornof, Trevor Jim · 2000
. Cyclone is a programming language that provides explicit support for dynamic specialization based on runtime code generation. To generate specialized code quickly, our Cyclone compiler uses a template based strategy in which pre-compiled code fragments are stitched together at runtime. To achieve good performance, the pre-compiled fragments must be optimized. This paper describes a principled approach to achieving such optimizations. In particular, we generalize standard flowgraph intermediate representations to support templates, define a formal mapping from (a subset of) Cyclone to this representation, and describe a data-flow analysis framework that supports standard optimizations. This extended version contains two mappings to the intermediate representation, a less formal one that emphasizes the novelties of our translation strategy and a purely functional one that is better suited to formal reasoning. 1 Introduction Runtime code generation (RTCG) is a kind of pro...