The course covers techniques for the implementation of programming languages using compilers in both real and virtual execution environments.

Aim

The overall aim of the course is to provide an understanding of how a programming language is implemented including common theories and how these theories are applied. The course will cover techniques for reading, understanding, translating, improving, and executing programs.

This understanding means that after the course a student should be able to:

• explain the overall structure of a compiler.
• describe regular expressions and finite automata and use them unambiguously for lexical analysis; combine and apply techniques to construct a deterministic finite automaton from regular expressions.
• describe context free grammars and apply them to capture common programming language constructs; describe the basic approach of top-down and bottom-up parsing; construct recursive descent, LL(1), LR(0), and SLR parsers; identify whether grammars can be used with a given parsing technique.
• list and describe tasks carried out during semantic analysis.
• describe the design principles behind intermediate program representations; explain and apply methods for selecting instructions; describe the organization of activation records and identify the impact of different design decisions for activation records on program execution.
• define the liveness of variables and compute liveness information from control flow graphs; define the principles of conservative approximations for analyzing programs; construct interference graphs and perform complete register allocation on them reflecting the design of activation records.
• name key components in an execution environment; describe simple techniques for heap management and garbage collection; identify the amortized costs of different approaches to garbage collection; list common techniques and explain their properties used in virtual execution environments.
• describe common techniques for program optimization; identify loops in programs using dominators; describe and apply techniques for optimizing loops and memory access.
• describe how characteristics of hardware architectures influence compilation of programs; give examples of important characteristics.

Synopsis

• Reading programs: lexical and syntactic analysis. Finite automata, regular expressions, LL- and LR-parsing.
• Understanding programs: semantic analysis, type checking. Scope control, declarations and expressions.
• Translating programs: machines and instructions. Intermediate code, instruction selection, stacks and procedure calls.
• Executing programs: virtual execution environments and run-time systems. Memory management, garbage collection, loading and linking, just-in-time compilation. Dependencies on hardware architecture.
• Improving programs: optimization. Machine independent optimizations (dataflow analysis, strength reduction, ...) Machine level optimization (register allocation, scheduling, prefetching, power consumption...).

Prerequisites

• IS1200 (2G1518) Computer Hardware Basics.
• 2G1519 Computer Science 2 or ID1218 Applied Programming or equivalent.

Requirements

Approved written exam (TEN1; 6hp) and approved home assignments (INL1; 1.5hp).

• Assignments
• Exam

Required Reading

Andrew W. Appel, Modern Compiler Implementation in Java, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
ISBN 0 521 82060 X

Additional reading material can be found under resources.

Schedule

The schedule is available in Daisy or here.

Contact

You can reach Christian Schulte, the course responsible, easily by email. In urgent cases you can also uses other forms of getting in touch.