Compiler Construction
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The Back End
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Back End
• The back end of the compiler translates IR into target
machine code.
• It chooses machine (assembly) instructions to implement
each IR operation.
• The back end ensure conformance with system interfaces.
• It decides which values to keep in registers in order to
avoid memory access; memory access is far slower than
register access.
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Instruction Selection
• The back end is responsible for instruction selection so as
to produce fast and compact code.
• Modern processors have a rich instruction set. The back
end takes advantage of target features such as addressing
modes.
• The back end takes Intermediate Representation as input
and converts (maps) it into target machine’s instruction set.
• One representation can have many ways (instructions) to
convert it, so it becomes the responsibility of the back end
to choose the appropriate instructions wisely.
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Instruction Selection
• CISC architecture provided a rich set of instructions and
addressing modes but it made the job of the compiler
harder when it came to generate efficient machine code.
• The RISC architecture simplified this problem.
CISC Features
• Rich Instruction Set (some simple , some very complex)..
• Complex addressing modes :
Orthogonal addressing ( Every possible addressing mode
for every instruction)
• Many instructions take multiple cycles. ( Large variation
in CPI) 5
Instruction Selection
• Instructions are of variable sizes.
• Small number of registers.
• No (or inefficient ) pipelining.
• RISC Features
• Small number of instructions
• Small number of addressing modes.
• Large number of registers. ( >32)
• Instructions execute in one or two clock cycles.
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• Uniformed length instructions and fixed instruction
format.
• Register/Register Architecture :
Separate memory transfer instructions ( LOAD / STORE )
• Separate instruction/data cache.
• Instruction Pipelining.
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Register Allocation
• Registers in a CPU play an important role for providing high
speed access to operands.
• Memory access is an order of magnitude slower than register
access.
• The back end attempts to have each operand value in a register
when it is used.
• The number of registers is small and some registers are pre-
allocated for specialized use .
• e.g., program counter, and thus are not available for use to the
back end.
• Back end decides what values to keep in the registers.
• It also decides the registers to be used to keep these values.
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Instruction Scheduling
• The back end decides the order in which the instruction
will be executed.
• It creates schedules for instructions to execute them.
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Three Pass Compiler
• Most modern compilers contain three stages.
• An intermediate stage is used for code improvement or
optimization.
• The structure of a three-pass compiler is shown in the
following figure:
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Three Pass Compiler
• The middle end analyzes IR and rewrites (or transforms) IR.
• Its primary goal is to reduce running time of the compiled
code.
• This may also improve space usage, power consumption,
etc. The middle end is generally termed the “Optimizer”.
• Modern optimizers are structured as a series of passes:
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Three Pass Compiler
Typical transformations performed by the optimizer are:
• Discover & propagate some constant value
• Move a computation to a less frequently executed place
• Discover a redundant computation & remove it
• Remove useless or unreachable code
• Encode an idiom in some particularly efficient form
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Role of Runtime System
• The executable code typically runs as a process in an
Operating System Environment.
• The application will need a number of resources from the
Operating System.
• For example, dynamic memory allocation and input output.
The process may spawn more processes of threads . If the
underline architecture has multiple processors, the
application may want to use them.
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Role of Runtime System
• Compilers need to have a detailed knowledge of the
runtime system to make effective use of the runtime
environment and machine resources.
• The issues in this context are:
• Memory management
• Allocate and de-allocate memory
• Support for parallelism
• Garbage collection
• Run-time type checking
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Role of Runtime System
• Error/exception processing
• Parallel threads
• Interface to OS - I/O.
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