Advanced Compiler Design and
Implementation by Steven Muchnick
Bible Of Compiler Data-Flow Analysis
Optimizing compilers, which turn human-readable programming
languages into the smallest, most efficient machine code possible, are
among the most complex pieces of software ever written. Building a
compiler is both science and black art and demands an intimate
knowledge of data structures, algorithms, high-level programming
languages, and processor architectures and their instruction sets.
Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation presents a
comprehensive and technically up-to-date look at design of real-world
compilers for CISC- and RISC-based uni-processor architectures. The
author led the advanced compiler design and implementation teams for
both Hewlett-Packards PA-RISC and Sun Microsystemss SPARC
processors.
Personal Review: Advanced Compiler Design and
Implementation by Steven Muchnick
Compiler development is more of a craft than a science, although there's
plenty of science involved. It involves huge numbers of tradeoffs in
features, optimizations, and use of the underlying processor. But, as long
as people keep coming up with new computing platforms (and not just
instruction set processors), new languages, and new performance
demands there will always be need for new compiler developers. If you
can't apprentice yourself to masters of the craft, or even if you can, this
book is a great introduction 2000-era compiler development.
Muchnik does a clear, thorough job of laying out the basics, starting with
the intermediate representation used. (If you get that wrong, nothing else is
going to work.) He then moves on to the basics of symbol table structure -
an issue that can get immensely complicated in systems like Microsoft's
CLR. He also discusses run time support briefly. Although that discussion
is good as far as it goes, it skips past a lot of the complexities of dynamic

loading, debug symbol tables, simulation support, and related issues. They
aren't strictly part of the compiled, executable code, but responsibilities of
the compiler developer nonetheless. Next comes a brief description of
code generation, crucial in normal environments but tangential to my own
needs.
That's just the first quarter of the book, though. The rest is the real meat of
the topic: code analysis and optimization techniques, over 600 pages of
discussion. It's way too much to summarize here, but even that just an
introduction to a huge technology. Still, you have to start somewhere.
By this point, you may be asking "But what about tokens, lexemes, and
grammars? Isn't that what compilers do?" Well, yes, but it's done. Tool
developers have made lexical analysis a commodity. The easily automated
tasks are not where modern compiler distinguishes itself. This book
addresses the semantic levels, getting the reader into the shallow end of
the industry's huge pool of specialized compilation knowledge.
If you have to self-teach compiler development - good luck. Start here,
though, and luck will have a lot less to do with the outcome.
//wiredweird
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