Optimizing in my toy compiler

Boriel <boriel@gmail.com> wrote:
> If I'm not wrong, stack-oriented code is easy to generate, but
> difficult to optimize whilst three or quad code is much easy to
> optimize. Any ideas? Which one should you suggest? I'm with "The
> Dragon book", and it have *too* much information. :-P


You can always optimize your code while it is in tree form an then
emit RPN. Or, in case your compiler does not build a syntax tree
while parsing, you can build one from the RPN code just for the
purpose of optimization.


This is what I have done in the T3X compiler[1]. Early versions did
not have an optimizer nor did they create syntax trees. The optimizer
in later versions was a separate program that read an intermediate
code file in RPN, built a tree from it, optimized that tree and
emitted optimized RPN. Converting RPN to a tree is not really hard.


Feel free to download the sources for inspiration:


[1] http://www.t3x.org/t3x/


--
Nils M Holm <nmh@t3x.org> -- http://t3x.org/nmh/

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.