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Re: the death of optimization compiler

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  Re: the death of optimization compiler Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2026-10-17 13:18 +0100

#3780 — Re: the death of optimization compiler

On 16/10/2026 11:41, anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at wrote:
> This idea looked interesting, amd I looked in the books, but did not
> find them inspiring apart from the basic idea.  And apparently the
> idea has not taken the world by storm, not even in the research world

There is the FermaT program transformation system, with its front-end
the FermaT Maintenance Environment:

http://www.gkc.org.uk/fermat.html

Admittedly, this has not entirely taken the world by storm :-)
but FermaT is currently being used commercial by Rocket Software
in the migration of IBM assembler systems to Rocket COBOL,
C and Java:

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/en-us/products/assembler-code-refactoring

At Rocket, and the previous company Software Migrations Ltd,
millions of lines of assembler code have been sucessfully migrated.

"Pigs from Sausages? Reengineering from Assembler to C via
FermaT Transformations", M.Ward, Science of Computer Programming,
Special Issue on Program Transformation,
Vol 52/1-3, pp 213-255, 2004. ISSN 0167-6423
doi:dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2004.03.007

http://www.gkc.org.uk/martin/papers/migration-t.pdf

The system can be used to derive a program from a formal specification
by applying a sequence of semantics-preserving transformations:

"Provably Correct Derivation of Algorithms Using FermaT"
Martin Ward and Hussein Zedan
Formal Aspects of Computing, September 2014.
Volume 26, Issue 5, Pages 993--1031, 2014-09-01, ISSN: 0934-5043
doi:dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00165-013-0287-2

http://www.gkc.org.uk/martin/papers/trans-prog-published-ward2014.pdf

The test cases in the above paper were Knuth's polynomial addition
problem from "Fundamental Algorithms", where the derived solution
was 2.1 times faster than Knuth's, and the polynomial multiplication
problem, where the derived source code worked perfectly the first time
it was executed.

--
			Mary

Dr Mary Ward | Email: martin@gkc.org.uk | http://www.gkc.org.uk
G.K.Chesterton site: http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc | Erdos number: 4

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