Program Optimization

Contents

The lecture is meant for students doing Master studies who are interested in compiler technology. 

Programs which we write should be both efficient and easily to maintain. In particular, maintainability means that programs should be well-structured and easily understandable also by humans. Being well-structured and easily readable, though, may often come at the price oft a degradation in efficiency at run-time.

For this reason, most compilers offer an optimization phase in which the source program is analyzed and where various transformations are applied to automatically improve efficiency. In some cases, it may happen that the attempt for improvement overshoots the target and results in programs which are perhaps fast but are no longer equivalent to the original program.

In the lecture, we give an overview over standard techniques for improving the quality of the generated code. In particular, we are interested in methods which guarantee that the resulting code still is equivalent to the source program.

The topics covered:

• Intra-procedural analysis and optimizations
• Abstract Interpretation and Interval Analysis
• Interprocedural optimizations
• Exploitation of hardware features such as registers, pipelines, caches, specific instructions
• Optimization of functional languages
• Optimization of Prolog

Last year slides

Exercises

Tutorials take place online Thursdays 14-16, you can join via BBB. All information about tutorials is available on Moodle.

The tutorial is given by Anastasiia Izycheva (izycheva@in.tum.de).

Links

• recordings from 2015
• compiler explorer

Bibliography

• Helmut Seidl, Reinhard Wilhelm and Sebastian Hack. Compiler Design - Analysis and Transformation. Springer, 2012.
• Helmut Seidl, Reinhard Wilhelm and Sebastian Hack. Übersetzerbau 3: Analyse und Transformation. Springer, 2010.