Dataflow Analyses and Compiler Optimizations that Use Them, for Free (blog.regehr.org)
from armchair_progamer@programming.dev to programming_languages@programming.dev on 21 Apr 2024 17:27
https://programming.dev/post/13069680

One of my research group’s major goals is to create technologies that enable self-improving compilers. Taking humans out of the compiler-improvement loop will make this process orders of magnitude faster, and also the resulting compilers will tend to be correct by construction. One such technology is superoptimization, where we use an expensive search procedure to discover optimizations that are missing from a compiler. Another is generalization, which takes a specific optimization (perhaps, but not necessarily, discovered by a superoptimizer) and turns it into a broadly applicable form that is suitable for inclusion in a production compiler.

Together with a representative benchmark suite, superoptimization + generalization will result in a fully automated self-improvement loop for one part of an optimizing compiler: the peephole optimizer. In the rest of this piece I’ll sketch out an expanded version of this self-improvement loop that includes dataflow analyses.

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