Implementation of a structured PL/I subset compiler

The thesis describes the design and implementation of a PL/I subset compiler which produces a hypothetical stack code as output. The compiler was based on a Pascal compiler developed by N. Wirth and U. Amman of Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, and was itself written in the Pascal language. PL/I programs using the compiler can now be compiled and executed (interpretively) on the UNIVAC 1106 computer at U.C.T. The compiler was designed mainly as a teaching system. Its lesson is that structured programming is a powerful technique which facilitated its design and implementation

Pattern matching in compilers

In this thesis we develop tools for effective and flexible pattern matching. We introduce a new pattern matching system called amethyst. Amethyst is not only a generator of parsers of programming languages, but can also serve as an alternative to tools for matching regular expressions. Our framework also produces dynamic parsers. Its intended use is in the context of IDE (accurate syntax highlighting and error detection on the fly). Amethyst offers pattern matching of general data structures. This makes it a useful tool for implementing compiler optimizations such as constant folding, instruction scheduling, and dataflow analysis in general. The parsers produced are essentially top-down parsers. Linear time complexity is obtained by introducing the novel notion of structured grammars and regularized regular expressions. Amethyst uses techniques known from compiler optimizations to produce effective parsers.Comment: master thesi

Miss Manners: A Specialized Silicon Compiler for Synchronizers

Miss Manners is a synchronizer generator that will produce the layout of a synchronizer given a high-level description. A synchronizer generator is a type of specialized silicon compiler. Synchronizer generators can greatly aid the design of systems that are structured as loosely-coupled networks of autonomous subsystems. Chips that are structured in this way have reduced communication requirements and greater tolerance for transient failures. We describe a language for specifying synchronization requirements and a compiler for translating the language into circuits that enforce the specifications

Beyond Good and Evil: Formalizing the Security Guarantees of Compartmentalizing Compilation

Compartmentalization is good security-engineering practice. By breaking a large software system into mutually distrustful components that run with minimal privileges, restricting their interactions to conform to well-defined interfaces, we can limit the damage caused by low-level attacks such as control-flow hijacking. When used to defend against such attacks, compartmentalization is often implemented cooperatively by a compiler and a low-level compartmentalization mechanism. However, the formal guarantees provided by such compartmentalizing compilation have seen surprisingly little investigation. We propose a new security property, secure compartmentalizing compilation (SCC), that formally characterizes the guarantees provided by compartmentalizing compilation and clarifies its attacker model. We reconstruct our property by starting from the well-established notion of fully abstract compilation, then identifying and lifting three important limitations that make standard full abstraction unsuitable for compartmentalization. The connection to full abstraction allows us to prove SCC by adapting established proof techniques; we illustrate this with a compiler from a simple unsafe imperative language with procedures to a compartmentalized abstract machine.Comment: Nit

A study of systems implementation languages for the POCCNET system

The results are presented of a study of systems implementation languages for the Payload Operations Control Center Network (POCCNET). Criteria are developed for evaluating the languages, and fifteen existing languages are evaluated on the basis of these criteria

Functional Programming of Geometry Shaders

This paper focuses on graphical shader programming, which is essential for real-time rendering. Opposite to classical low level, structured languages, functional approach is used in this work and existing work is extended to cover geometry shader programming. The compiler is able to transform the program in a way that is hard to achieve with classical languages. The program is written for all pipeline stages at once and the compiler does the partitioning. This allows the programmer to focus on program semantics and let the compiler take care of the efficient execution. First, this paper describes shader stages as functions in a mathematical manner. The process of program partitioning and transformation to one of the classical languages is described. Several examples show the differences between functional description and equivalent structured code