Use of a formal notation for static semantics in compiler design

Formal notations for the specification of the syntax and the dynamic semantics of languages exist and are of great benefit to the compiler writer. However, formal notations for the static semantics of languages have tended to be tools of the language designer and of little practical significance to the compiler writer. This paper describes how a particular notation was used to assist in the implementation of a Cobol compiler and of an interpreter for a simulation language.     

同步数据流语言可信编译器Vélus与L2C的比较

同步数据流语言（如Lustre、Signal）在航空、高铁、核电等安全关键领域得到广泛应用.例如,适合这些领域实时控制系统建模和开发的Scade工具就是基于一种类Lustre语言.这类语言相关开发工具,特别是编译器的安全性问题也自然受到高度关注.近年来,基于形式化验证实现可信编译器构造成为程序设计语言领域的研究焦点之一,也取得了瞩目的成果,如CompCert项目实现了产品级的可信C编译器.同样,人们也采用这种方法开展了同步数据流语言可信编译器的研发工作.主要关注从事这一工作的两个长线项目,二者均研发面向基于Lustre的同步数据流语言编译器,分别以Vélus和L2C代称.对Vélus和L2C从多个重要的角度进行较为深入的分析与比较.     

Survey of compiler testing methods

Compilers are used for creating executable modules for programs written in high-level languages; therefore, the presence of errors in a compiler is a serious danger for the quality of the software developed with the use of this compiler. As in the case of any other software, testing is one of the most important methods of quality control and error detection in compilers. The survey is devoted to methods for generating, running, and checking the quality of compiler test suites, which are based on formal specifications of the programming language syntax and semantics.Translated from Programmirovanie, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2005.Original Russian Text Copyright © 2005 by Kossatchev, Posypkin.     

一种包解析器硬件配置描述语言及其编译结构

本文设计一种用于实现可重构网络数据包解析器的专用硬件配置描述语言P3.由于要有利于高安全等级网络的实现,我们侧重于从高可信性角度进行语言设计,包括形式化定义该语言的类型系统和操作语义,以及设计其可信编译结构.基于对可重构硬件基本需求的充分理解,本文从软硬件协同角度出发,最终明确了P3语言的核心特性及其编译器P3C的可信编译结构.由于可重构数据包解析器是软件定义网络（SDN）、可编程数据平面的重要一环,因此实现P3C的可信编译结构将对SDN的安全性有着重大意义.期待P3C项目的开展,能促进网络与形式化领域相关工作的进一步研究.     

Towards a simple and safe Objective Caml compiling framework for the synchronous language SIGNAL

This paper presents a simple and safe compiler, called MinSIGNAL, from a subset of the synchronous dataflow language SIGNAL to C, as well as its existing enhancements. The compiler follows a modular architecture, and can be seen as a sequence of source-to-source transformations applied to an intermediate representation which is named Synchronous Clocked Guarded Actions (S-CGA) and translation to sequential imperative code. Objective Caml (OCaml) is used for the implementation of MinSIGNAL. As a modern functional language, OCaml is adapted to symbolic computation and so, particularly suitable for compiler design and implementation of formal analysis tools. In particular, the safety of its type checking allows to skip some verification that would be mandatory with other languages. Additionally, this work is a basis for the formal verification of the compilation of SIGNAL with a theorem prover such as Coq.     

From bytecode to JavaScript: the Js_of_ocaml compiler

We present the design and implementation of a compiler from OCaml bytecode to JavaScript. The compiler first translates the bytecode into a static single‐assignment intermediate representation on which optimizations are performed, before generating JavaScript. We believe that taking bytecode as an input instead of a high‐level language is a sensible choice. Virtual machines provide a very stable API. Such a compiler is thus easy to maintain. It is also convenient to use, and it can just be added to an existing installation of the development tools. Already‐compiled libraries can be used directly, with no need to reinstall anything. Finally, some virtual machines are the target of several languages. A bytecode to JavaScript compiler would make it possible to retarget all these languages to Web browsers at once. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Accurate garbage collection in uncooperative environments revisited

Implementing a concurrent programming language such as Java by means of a translator to an existing language is attractive as it provides portability over all platforms supported by the host language and reduces development time—as many low‐level tasks can be delegated to the host compiler. The C and C++ programming languages are popular choices for many language implementations due to the availability of efficient compilers on a wide range of platforms. For garbage‐collected languages, however, they are not a perfect match as no support is provided for accurately discovering pointers to heap‐allocated data on thread stacks. We evaluate several previously published techniques and propose a new mechanism, lazy pointer stacks, for performing accurate garbage collection in such uncooperative environments. We implemented the new technique in the Ovm Java virtual machine with our own Java‐to‐C/C++ compiler using GCC as a back‐end compiler. Our extensive experimental results confirm that lazy pointer stacks outperform existing approaches: we provide a speedup of 4.5% over Henderson's accurate collector with a 17% increase in code size. Accurate collection is essential in the context of real‐time systems, we thus validate our approach with the implementation of a real‐time concurrent garbage collection algorithm. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Compiler Verification and Compiler Architecture

We study issues in verifying compilers for modern imperative and object-oriented languages. We take the view that it is not the compiler but the code generated by it which must be correct. It is this subtle difference that allows for reusing standard compiler architecture, construction methods and tools also in a verifying compiler.Program checking is the main technique for avoiding the cumbersome task of verifying most parts of a compiler and the tools by which they are generated. Program checking remaps the result of a compiler phase to its origin, the input of this phase, in a provably correct manner. We then only have to compare the actual input to its regenerated form, a basically syntactic process. The correctness proof of the generation of the result is replaced by the correctness proof of the remapping process. The latter turns out to be far easier than proving the generating process correct.The only part of a compiler where program checking does not seem to work is the transformation step which replaces source language constructs and their semantics, given, e.g., by an attributed syntax tree, by an intermediate representation, e.g., in SSA-form, which is expressing the same program but in terms of the target machine. This transformation phase must be directly proven using Hoare logic and/or theorem-provers. However, we can show that given the features of today's programming languages and hardware architectures this transformation is to a large extent universal: it can be reused for any pair of source and target language. To achieve this goal we investigate annotating the syntax tree as well as the intermediate representation with constraints for exhibiting specific properties of the source language. Such annotations are necessary during code optimization anyway.     

Removing partial parametrization for efficient implementation of functional languages

This paper describes a program transformation technique for functional languages called removing partial parametrization. By transforming functional programs into equivalent ones without partial parametrization, each function is applied to the same number of arguments as its formal parameters. A new method of improving the efficiency of the implementation of functional language is to design the compiler according to the features of the program without partial parametrization. We have used this method in the environment-based implementation of the functional programming language LK. Programs run considerably faster and consume less memory space than traditional ones.     

Security types preserving compilation

Starting from the seminal work of Volpano and Smith, there has been growing evidence that type systems may be used to enforce confidentiality of programs through non-interference. However, most type systems operate on high-level languages and calculi, and “low-level languages have not received much attention in studies of secure information flow” (Sabelfeld and Myers, [Language-based information-flow security. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 2003; 21:5–19]). Therefore, we introduce an information flow type system for a low-level language featuring jumps and calls, and show that the type system enforces termination-insensitive non-interference.Furthermore, information flow type systems for low-level languages should appropriately relate to their counterparts for high-level languages. Therefore, we introduce a compiler from a high-level imperative programming language to our low-level language, and show that the compiler preserves information flow types.     

Static consistency checking of web applications with WebDSL

Modern web application development frameworks provide web application developers with high-level abstractions to improve their productivity. However, their support for static verification of applications is limited. Inconsistencies in an application are often not detected statically, but appear as errors at run-time. The reports about these errors are often obscure and hard to trace back to the source of the inconsistency. A major part of this inadequate consistency checking can be traced back to the lack of linguistic integration of these frameworks. Parts of an application are defined with separate domain-specific languages, which are not checked for consistency with the rest of the application. Examples include regular expressions, query languages and XML-based languages for definition of user interfaces. We give an overview and analysis of typical problems arising in development with frameworks for web application development, with Ruby on Rails, Lift and Seam as representatives.To remedy these problems, in this paper, we argue that domain-specific languages should be designed from the ground up with static verification and cross-aspect consistency checking in mind, providing linguistic integration of domain-specific sub-languages. We show how this approach is applied in the design of WebDSL, a domain-specific language for web applications, by examining how its compiler detects inconsistencies not caught by web frameworks, providing accurate and clear error messages. Furthermore, we show how this consistency analysis can be expressed with a declarative rule-based approach using the Stratego transformation language.     

Component-based LR parsing

A language implementation with proper compositionality enables a compiler developer to divide-and-conquer the complexity of building a large language by constructing a set of smaller languages. Ideally, these small language implementations should be independent of each other such that they can be designed, implemented and debugged individually, and later be reused in different applications (e.g., building domain-specific languages). However, the language composition offered by several existing parser generators resides at the grammar level, which means all the grammar modules need to be composed together and all corresponding ambiguities have to be resolved before generating a single parser for the language. This produces tight coupling between grammar modules, which harms information hiding and affects independent development of language features. To address this problem, we have developed a novel parsing algorithm that we call Component-based LR (CLR) parsing, which provides code-level compositionality for language development by producing a separate parser for each grammar component. In addition to shift and reduce actions, the algorithm extends general LR parsing by introducing switch and return actions to empower the parsing action to jump from one parser to another. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that CLR increases the comprehensibility, reusability, changeability and independent development ability of the language implementation. Moreover, the loose coupling among parser components enables CLR to describe grammars that contain LR parsing conflicts or require ambiguous token definitions, such as island grammars and embedded languages.     

A transportable extendable compiler

This report describes the development of a transportable extendable self-compiler for the language SIMPL-T. SIMPL-T is designed as the base language for a family of languages. The structure of the SIMPL-T compiler and its transportable bootstrap are described. In addition, the procedures for generating a compiler for a new machine and for boot-strapping the new compiler on to the new machine are demonstrated.     

Information system structure for a task level robot assembly language for on-line program generation

The increasing industrial need for production automation in one of a kind production and increasing demand for one of a kind or small batch production requires that automation is carried out by programmable automatic equipment in order to ensure that this equipment can be rapidly and easily adjusted and configured to the ever changing production tasks. In order that the adjustment and reconfiguration of the production equipment can be carried out quickly, reliably and in compatibility with the state of the production plant at the time of task execution it is necessary that the equipment tasks can be specified by a specification language, which is much more abstract than the task specification languages that are today commercially available for machine tool and robot programming, and that the corresponding compiler can be controlled by the system controlling the sequence of operations of the assembly plant. To comply with this need a task level robot programming language for assembly operations has been developed with a level of abstraction corresponding to the level of abstraction for the command: Mount part A. The compiler of the language retrieves information about placement and orientation of the parts to be assembled from a database. The information is supplied to the database by proper sensors mounted on the assembly plant, implying that the program which is generated corresponds to the state of the physical plant at program execution time. Additionally, making available information of permitted production assembly sequences has enabled the compiler to be controlled by a system that optimizes the sequence in which a particular assembly should be carried out respecting present availability of resources needed for the assembling tasks.In this paper the designed robot language, the corresponding compiler and the necessary information structures are presented.     

可信编译器L2C的核心翻译步骤及其设计与实现

同步数据流语言（如Lustre）近年来在航空、高铁、核电等安全攸关领域得到广泛应用.这些领域对相关开发工具本身的安全性有着相当高的要求.为尽力解决好”误编译”问题,近期人们借助reliable-by-construction辅助定理证明器实现常规命令式语言编译器的构造和验证取得了很大的成功,如CompCert C编译器.L2C是基于这种方法开发的可信编译器,它以扩展的Lustre语言为源语言,以Clight （CompCert中的C语言子集）为目标语言.就我们所知,L2C是同类工作中唯一面向实际工业应用的同步数据流语言编译器.本文重点介绍L2C编译器的核心翻译步骤及其设计与实现过程中考虑的主要问题和相关经验.     

High level languages on any machine through VAL

High level languages have gradually become the norm over the last 20 years, but recently the cost of the processor has been so reduced as to make the software the dominant cost of any system design. For microprocessors, this presents problems of compiler cost, due to the rapid obsolescence of instructions sets, and of compiler inefficiency, as microprocessor instruction sets were not suitable for high level languages until very recently. By designing a compiler that can produce code for several microprocessors with minimal rework, and can produce efficient object code by virtue of skeleton optimization, the advantages of high level languages can be available to all.