Embedded in Academia

Category: Compilers

  • A Critical Look at the SCADE Compiler Verification Kit

    While searching for related work on compiler testing and certification, I ran across the SCADE Compiler Verification Kit: a collection of SCADE-generated C code along with some test vectors. The idea is to spot compiler problems early and in a controlled fashion by testing the compiler using the kinds of C code that SCADE generates.…

  • A Quick Update to Comparing Compiler Optimizations

    Saturday’s post on Comparing Compiler Optimizations featured some work done by my student Yang Chen. Since then: There has been some discussion of these problems on the GCC mailing list; some of the problems are already in the Bugzilla and a new PR was filed. A patch fixing the problem is already available! On Sunday…

  • Comparing Compiler Optimizations

    [Update from Dec 14: Some of these problems have already been fixed! Details here.] [This is a guest post by my grad student Yang Chen, describing one of the projects he’s been working on lately. I elaborated on some of Yang’s points, edited, and did some formatting for WordPress.] Our goal is to help C…

  • Wanted: Invariant-Based Synchronization

    Although a significant fraction of the programming languages community works on detecting race conditions in multi-threaded software, I haven’t been able to get very excited about this. Certainly race-free programs have some nice properties, but race freedom is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for concurrency correctness. This research area doesn’t feel to me like…