A Prolog compiler and its extension for OR-parallelism

This report describes algorithms for the compiler component of the Aurora Or-Parallel Prolog system. The compiler translates one Prolog clause at a time into a sequence of abstract instructions. The instruction set is based on the sequential Warren Ab- stract Machine (WAM) with extensions for full Prolog, shallow backtracking, memory management and garbage collection, and for the SRI model of or-parallel execution of Prolog. Most of the described algorithms apply to compilation of sequential Prolog programs. The extensions introduced to support or-parallelism are minor, and concern pruning operators (cut and commit) and compile-time allocation of binding array offsets for permanent variables (generalised environment trimming). Code generation proper is kept separate from register allocation, and uses heuristics for finding a compilation order which minimises the number of register-register copies. After such copies have been coalesced where possible, register allocation is performed in a single pass over the intermediate code. The various compilation phases are described in detail, and the implementation is compared with some other compilers

A formally verified compiler back-end

This article describes the development and formal verification (proof of semantic preservation) of a compiler back-end from Cminor (a simple imperative intermediate language) to PowerPC assembly code, using the Coq proof assistant both for programming the compiler and for proving its correctness. Such a verified compiler is useful in the context of formal methods applied to the certification of critical software: the verification of the compiler guarantees that the safety properties proved on the source code hold for the executable compiled code as well

Fast Recompilation of Object Oriented Modules

Once a program file is modified, the recompilation time should be minimized, without sacrificing execution speed or high level object oriented features. The recompilation time is often a problem for the large graphical interactive distributed applications tackled by modern OO languages. A compilation server and fast code generator were developed and integrated with the SRC Modula-3 compiler and Linux ELF dynamic linker. The resulting compilation and recompilation speedups are impressive. The impact of different language features, processor speed, and application size are discussed