Compiler backend generated from declarative description of the architecture

Question

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?

LLVM might come close to what you are looking for? – Realz Slaw Oct 14 '13 at 01:21 — Realz Slaw, Oct 14 '13 at 01:21

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 14 '13 at 14:57

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.

gcc uses machine description files, but it looks like these typically contain additional information to support optimization. — , Oct 14 '13 at 15:20

Compiler backend generated from declarative description of the architecture

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