paper available on MasPar techniques for preserving debuggability while optimizing

The MPFortran and MPC compilers for the MasPar MP-1 and MP-2 machines
ran many of their optimization phases even when generating debug
information. Rather than the usual tradeoff between not optimizing at
all when compiling for debug or exposing the optimized program
behavior through the debugger, we "tamed" the optimizations by
introducing semantically meaningful pseudo-operations into our
intermediate representation to model statement boundaries and the
possible debugger activity of reading and modifying variable values.
This allowed us to preserve a sane source-level debugging experience
while getting much (though certainly not all) of the performance
benefit of optimizing.


It's a dozen years since I should have done so, but I've finally
written a first cut of a paper on the techniques we used. If anyone
out there is interested, please follow the link to the .pdf from
http://www.geocities.com/david_m_alpern . As noted, this is a first
cut; comments are welcome.


- Dave

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