TDF (ANDF) information

After the last time TDF (the OSF's chosen ANDF) was discussed here, I dug
out an old email contact address and sent off for the newer information
pack. This comes as 3 (soon to be 4) documents:


- TDF Specification (56pp)
- TDF Facts and Figures (9pp, gives comparative benchmarks)
- TDF and portability (14pp)
- Introductory Guide to TDF (available soon)


You too can be the proud owner of this stuff by contacting:


Dr Nic E Peeling
Defence Research Agency
RSRE
St Andrews Road
Great Malvern
Worcestershire
U.K.
WR14 3PS


Tel: +44 684 895314
Fax: +44 684 894303
Internet: peeling%hermes.mod.uk@relay.mod.uk
Janet: peeling@uk.mod.hermes


TDF is an Architecture Neutral Distribution Format (ANDF). It's similar to
a machine-independent intermediate representation in a compiler. The idea
is that software vendors can sell a single shrink-wrapped ANDF version
(made by a `producer', similar to a compiler front-end) of their stuff and
anyone with an ANDF `installer' (back end) on their machine can buy it and
run it. It's a bit like UNCOL in the breadth of its aims but seems to
actually work....


Only a subset of TDF was chosen by the OSF for its ANDF. This subset is
sufficient for ANSI C, but TDF as a whole was designed to support (at
least) FORTRAN, COBOL, C++, Ada, ML, and LISP also.


DRAE have the following TDF items:


- ANSI C producer
- MIPS, VAX, i386, SPARC, and 68k installers
- ANDF to ANDF optimizer
- ANDF pretty-printer.
- ANDF linker


They are working on these items:


- C++ producer
- Transputer installer
- extensions to TDF to support parallelism


and you can be sure that producers for other languages are in the works
(through collaboration with other bodies, to make an informed guess).


>From "TDF Facts and Figures" (which gives runtime/compile-time/ filesize
benchmarks comparing TDF compilers with other compilers) I've distilled
these runtime benchmarks. On these machines:


Platform OS Native Compiler


VAXStation 3100 Ultrix 4.2 GCC 1.37.1
DECStation 5100 Ultrix 4.1 CC -O2 and CC -O3
Dell 486 SCO UNIX GCC 1.37.1 -O
SPARCStation 2 SunOS 4.1.1 CC -O3
HP 9000/425T HP-UX 7.05 CC -O


they got these runtime results for these parts of SPEC (values greater
than 1 show TDF better than native compiler):


eqntott espresso gcc xlisp


VAX 1.02 0.98 0.90 1.03
MIPS 0.99 0.95 1.01 0.95
MIPS* 0.91 0.91 0.98
486 1.01 1.02 0.90 1.08
SPARC 1.15 1.00 0.81 0.97
68k 1.29 0.83 0.90 0.90


(* the -O3 level on CC does multi-file optimizations. The corresponding
level of optimization (tcc -M) was used for the TDF compiler in this
instance but not in any of the other tests. The gcc benchmark does not run
correctly with CC -O3, so this was omitted).


Nick Haines nickh@cs.cmu.edu
--

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