Cecil and Vortex Systems Released

        The Cecil Group at the University of Washington is proud to
announce the general release of version 3.0 of the Cecil and Vortex
systems.


        Cecil is a purely object-oriented language intended to support
rapid construction of high-quality, extensible software. Cecil
incorporates multimethods, a simple prototype-based object model,
predicate objects, first-class functions, and a flexible
constraint-based polymorphic type system which allows statically- and
dynamically-typed code to mix freely. More details on Cecil's
features are available at:
        http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/cecil.html


        Vortex is an optimizing compiler infrastructure for
object-oriented languages. Vortex includes front-ends for Cecil,
Java, C/C++, Modula-3, and ParcPlace Smalltalk (an IBM Smalltalk
front-end is under development), all of which translate to a common
intermediate language. Vortex currently incorporates high-level
optimizations such as intra- and interprocedural static class
analysis, whole-program class hierachy analysis, profile-guided
receiver class prediction, profile-guided selective procedure
specialization, intraprocedural message splitting, automatic inlining,
and static closure analyses. It also includes a collection of
standard intraprocedural analyses such as common subexpression
elimination and dead assignment elimination, and some not-so-standard
analyses such as must-alias analysis supporting optimization of
redundant and dead loads and stores, symbolic comparison analysis to
eliminate unnecessary comparisons including array bounds checks, and
stack-allocation of closures where possible. Vortex is designed to be
easy to extend with new optimizations. For example, Vortex's analyses
are implemented using a generic dataflow analysis framework; this
framework supports automatically composing modular analyses and
transformations to achieve more precise results, and it supports
extending intraprocedural analyses to context-sensitive
interprocedural versions. Vortex generates either portable C code or
SPARC assembly code (accurate garbage collection is available when
using the SPARC back-end; conservative garbage collection is used
otherwise). The Vortex compiler is written entirely in Cecil. More
details on Vortex's features are available at:
        http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil/vortex.html


        Versions of Cecil and Vortex are available for SPARC/SunOS,
SPARC/Solaris, PowerPC/AIX, Alpha/OSF, x86/Linux, and x86/NT.


        More information about the release, copies of the Cecil language
specification, Vortex compiler documentation, current benchmark
results, and further information on the Cecil/Vortex project and its
publications are available at:
        http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cecil

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