Re: Quality of VAX compilers

Louis Krupp <lkrupp@pssw.nospam.com.invalid>
5 Jun 2006 20:46:18 -0400

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Related articles
Quality of VAX compilers firefly@diku.dk (Peter \Firefly\Lund) (2006-06-03)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers lkrupp@pssw.nospam.com.invalid (Louis Krupp) (2006-06-05)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers firefly@diku.dk (Peter \Firefly\Lund) (2006-06-07)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers jafred@verizon.net (John Fredrickson) (2006-06-07)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2006-06-11)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers tom@kednos.com (Tom Linden) (2006-06-11)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers jvorbrueggen@mediasec.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?=) (2006-06-12)
Re: Quality of VAX compilers tom@kednos.com (Tom Linden) (2006-06-15)
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From: Louis Krupp <lkrupp@pssw.nospam.com.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 5 Jun 2006 20:46:18 -0400
Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com
References: 06-06-009
Keywords: code, history
Posted-Date: 05 Jun 2006 20:46:18 EDT

Peter "Firefly" Lund wrote:
> I seem to have acquired an acute fascination with the VAX architecture.
>
> As part of that, I'm curious to know about the quality and methods
> employed by the old VAX compilers. ...


You might find some of what you want in this book about DEC's PL/I compiler:


Engineering a Compiler: Vax-II Code Generation and Optimization
Patricia Anklam
1982


This page:


http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/87-07-021


mentions a book on DEC's BLISS compiler:


The Design of an Optimizing Compiler
William Allan Wulf
1980


Louis
[I have both books. The first one tells you all about code generation
for the Vax as done by their PL/I and C compiler. It was a pretty
normal compiler for the late 70s, reasonable common subexpression
handling and pre-graph-coloring register allocation. They spent a lot
of effort in instruction selection, to use all of the Vax instructions
and address modes. The Wulf book is a classic, but the target was the
PDP-11, not the Vax. -John]



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