Re: Are there "compiler generators"?

From	anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Are there "compiler generators"?
Date	2022-05-29 06:45 +0000
Organization	Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
Message-ID	<22-05-057@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<22-05-054@comp.compilers>

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Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> writes:
>Are there compiler generators?

Apart from scanner generators and parser generators, there are also:

* generators of attribute grammar evaluators (e.g., Ox).  They use an
  attribute grammar as input.

* generators of instruction selectors (e.g., burg and friends).  Burg
  uses a tree grammar as input.

* generators of virtual machine interpreters and other code dealing
  with virtual machine instructions (e.g., vmgen).  Vmgen uses a
  description of the virtual machine instructions as inputs.

* There is also some work on generating type checkers.

All of these could be classified as non-procedural, although they tend
to include some procedural code.

You need to add substantial amounts of glue code to integrate the
pieces generated by these generators into a compiler, especially for
languages that do not quite fit in the generators' molds. Plus, there
are pieces such as symbol tables and register allocation that are not
covered by these generators.

I have also seen a paper by a French group (don't remember the names)
in the early 1990s where a generator could generate a complete Pascal
compiler from a specification.  My impression, however, was that the
generator could only generate compilers for languages that are
relatively close to Pascal, and I saw no good way to make it much more
flexible.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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Are there "compiler generators"? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-05-28 22:27 +0000
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2022-05-29 13:34 +1000
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Jan Ziak <0xe2.0x9a.0x9b@gmail.com> - 2022-05-28 23:52 -0700
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-05-29 06:45 +0000
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> - 2022-05-29 09:14 +0000
    Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-05-30 14:53 +0200
      Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-05-31 12:57 +0200
        Re: Are there "compiler generators"? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-05-31 16:55 -0700
          RE: Are there compiler generators? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-06-01 14:07 +0300
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2022-05-29 12:00 +0100
    Re: Are there "compiler generators"? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-05-30 07:35 +0000
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Fernando <pronesto@gmail.com> - 2022-05-29 05:00 -0700
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-05-29 23:29 -0700
    Re: Are there "compiler generators"? mac <acolvin@efunct.com> - 2022-06-09 14:12 +0000
  Re: Are there "compiler generators"? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2022-05-30 20:20 +0000

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