RISE & Shine: Language-Oriented Compiler Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a language-oriented approach to compiler design, using formal IRs as programming languages with type systems to improve robustness, extensibility, and performance in domain-specific compiler frameworks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel compiler design paradigm that treats IRs as formal languages with type systems, demonstrated through the Shine compiler for data-parallel programming.

Findings

Shine compiler effectively generates high-performance GPU code.

Language-oriented IR design enhances robustness and predictability.

Compared to Lift IR, Shine offers better extensibility and formal reasoning.

Abstract

The trend towards specialization of software and hardware - fuelled by the end of Moore's law and the still accelerating interest in domain-specific computing, such as machine learning - forces us to radically rethink our compiler designs. The era of a universal compiler framework built around a single one-size-fits-all intermediate representation (IR) is over. This realization has sparked the creation of the MLIR compiler framework that empowers compiler engineers to design and integrate IRs capturing specific abstractions. MLIR provides a generic framework for SSA-based IRs, but it doesn't help us to decide how we should design IRs that are easy to develop, to work with and to combine into working compilers. To address the challenge of IR design, we advocate for a language-oriented compiler design that understands IRs as formal programming languages and enforces their correct use via an accompanying type system. We argue that programming language techniques directly guide extensible IR designs and provide a formal framework to reason about transforming between multiple IRs. In this paper, we discuss the design of the Shine compiler that compiles the high-level functional pattern-based data-parallel language RISE via a hybrid functional-imperative intermediate language to C, OpenCL, and OpenMP. We compare our work directly with the closely related pattern-based Lift IR and compiler. We demonstrate that our language-oriented compiler design results in a more robust and predictable compiler that is extensible at various abstraction levels. Our experimental evaluation shows that this compiler design is able to generate high-performance GPU code.