An extension-oriented compiler
Name
320238528-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
654.77 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
bbc4d33eb194e68348eecf696b0126d7
Author(s)
Cox, Russell Stensby
Advisor(s)
M. Frans Kaashoek and Eddie Kohler.
Date Issued
2008
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
The thesis of this dissertation is that compilers can and should allow programmers to extend programming languages with new syntax, features, and restrictions by writing extension modules that act as plugins for the compiler. We call compilers designed around this idea extension-oriented. The central challenge in designing and building an extension-oriented compiler is the creation of extension interfaces that are simultaneously powerful, to allow effective extensions; convenient, to make these extensions easy to write; and composable, to make it possible to use independently-written extensions together. This dissertation proposes and evaluates extension-oriented syntax trees (XSTs) as a way to meet these challenges. The key interfaces to XSTs are grammar statements, a convenient, composable interface to extend the input parser; syntax patterns, a way to manipulate XSTs in terms of the original program syntax; canonicalizers, which put XSTs into a canonical form to extend the reach of syntax patterns; and attributes, a lazy computation mechanism to structure analyses on XSTs and allow extensions to cooperate. We have implemented these interfaces in a small procedural language called zeta. Using zeta, we have built an extension-oriented compiler for C called xoc and then 13 extensions to C ranging in size from 16 lines to 245 lines.To evaluate XSTs and xoc, this dissertation examines two examples in detail: a reimplementation of the programming language Alef and a reimplementation of the Linux kernel checker Sparse. Both of these examples consist of a handful of small extensions
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-110).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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