A practical method for code generation based on exhaustive search

Abstract

An original method for code generation has been developed in conjunction with the construction of a compiler for the C programming language on the DEC-10 computer. The method is comprehensive, determining evaluation order and doing register allocation and instruction selection simultaneously. It uses exhaustive search rather than heuristics, and is table-driven, with most machine-specific information isolated in the tables. Testing and evaluation have shown that the method is effective, that the search process is not too time consuming, and that the compiler is capable of producing code as good as that of other optimizing compilers.