Future Directions for Optimizing Compilers

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and future directions in optimizing compiler design to improve speed, correctness, and output quality amidst growing software complexity and hardware limitations.

Contribution

It highlights key research areas and strategies for making optimizing compilers faster, more reliable, and capable of exploiting advanced hardware features.

Findings

Identifies the need for balancing optimization quality and compilation speed.

Emphasizes importance of correctness and bug reduction in compiler development.

Suggests future research directions for compiler efficiency and capability improvements.

Abstract

As software becomes larger, programming languages become higher-level, and processors continue to fail to be clocked faster, we'll increasingly require compilers to reduce code bloat, eliminate abstraction penalties, and exploit interesting instruction sets. At the same time, compiler execution time must not increase too much and also compilers should never produce the wrong output. This paper examines the problem of making optimizing compilers faster, less buggy, and more capable of generating high-quality output.