Register allocation... DONE!

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

My compilers class is using the Appel book Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Chapters 1 through 12 have a programming exercise that walks you through building a compiler in ML for a language called Tiger targetting the MIPS processor. It's pretty neat--Tiger has some funky things in it that make some of the pieces non-trivial.

After a week of programming straight (i.e. I get up in the morning, eat something, put on sweat pants, work on the compiler... go to bed) we got register allocation working using graph coloring. It does spills and coalescing but not coalescing of spills--that'd be really cool.

I'm really psyched! I think all we have left is some minor bits here and there and then it's done and we'll have a compiler for Tiger. I'm tossing around adding a random number generator to the runtime.c file so that I can implement a Dwarven name generator using Markov chains.

A friend of mine gave me his new album Digital Analog Heart and Soul a couple of weeks ago. I had it ripped on my hard drive and so that's what I listened to for the last 7 days of register allocator programming. The song The Fall is pretty cool--he's done it in concerts a lot.

Now I need to get back to my research project....

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