A comparison of designs for extensible and extension-oriented compilers

Today's system programmers go to great lengths to extend the languages in which they program. For instance, system-specific compilers and errors in Linux and other systems, and add support for specialized control flow to Qt and event-based programs. These compilers are difficult to build and cannot always understand each other's language changes. However, they can greatly improve code understandability and correctness, advantages that should be accessible to all programmers. This thesis considers four extensible and extension-oriented compilers: CIL, Polyglot, xtc, and Xoc. These four compilers represent four distinctly different approaches to the problem of bridging the gap between language design and system implementation. Taking an extension author's point of view, this thesis compares the design of each compiler's extension interface in terms of extension structure, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, and rewriting. To perform the comparison, this thesis uses three extensions implemented variously in the four compilers: a bitwise rotation operator, function expressions, and lock checking. These extensions are designed to span a representative space of analysis and rewriting needs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Clements, Austin T., S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• M. Frans Kaashoek.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45630

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/45630