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Compiler backend generated from declarative description of the architecture

Submitted by: @import:stackexchange-cs··
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backenddeclarativegeneratedthearchitecturedescriptioncompilerfrom

Problem

Is it possible, given a declarative description of an architecture's register layout and instruction semantics and machine code encodings, to autogenerate a compiler back-end?

If so, has anyone ever done this?

Solution

João Dias; Norman Ramsey: "Automatically Generating Back Ends Using Declarative Machine Descriptions", Proc. ACM Symp. Principles of Prog. Lang., (POPL-37):403-416, 2010.

I think this goes a bit farther than you asked for, because they're actually looking for good code sequences. For something a little more basic you could go back to some of Norm Ramsey's earlier work, like: Norman Ramsey; Mary F. Fernández: "Specifying Representations of Machine Instructions", ACM T. Prog. Lang. and Sys., 19(3):492–524, May 1997.

There's a long line of research on trying to automatically generate back ends from simpler descriptions. Look for papers by Christopher W Fraser, David R Hanson and Todd A Proebsting.

Context

StackExchange Computer Science Q#16058, answer score: 3

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