Conclusion

 

The originality of PIPS is the conjunction of:

• modularity and easy adding of a new phase as stated in this article;
• interprocedurality and automatic coherency management in a demand-driven system combining database (PIPSDBM ) and dependence (PIPSMAKE ) functions;
• advanced interprocedural semantic and data-flow analyses already implemented, and their mathematical foundation upon linear algebra (Linear C$3$ library ).
• software foundation upon an high level description system (NEWGEN ) which automatically generates functions (access, constructor, destructor) and can iterate on arbitrary structures. An additional by-product is that the code look and feel is homogeneous over the $150,000$ lines of the compiler.
• multi-target:
  • automatic parallelization for shared-memory
  • compilation for distributed-memory models (HPFC [2], WP65 [1])
  • automatic data mapping...
• the availability of different interfaces (shell, terminal TPIPS , graphical WPIPS ).

Eight years after its inception, PIPS as a workbench is still alive and well. PIPS provides a robust infrastructure for new experiments in compilation, program analysis, optimization, transformation and parallelization. The PIPS developer environment is described in [6], but it is also possible to develop new phases on top of but outside of PIPS since all (in fact, most...) PIPS data structures can be reloaded using NEWGEN primitives.

PIPS can also be used as a reverse engineering tool. region analyses [4] provide useful summaries of procedure effects, while precondition -based partial evaluation and dead code elimination reduce code size.

PIPS may be less robust than other publicly available source-to-source compilers but the stress is put on the ability to quickly add new phases such as program transformations, semantic analyses, parsers, parallelizers, etc. or new user interfaces without spending time developing a cumbersome infrastructure.

The PIPS software and documentation is available on http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/pips.

 
• Acknowledgment