‹Programming› 2020
Mon 23 - Thu 26 March 2020 Porto, Portugal
Thu 26 Mar 2020 11:30 - 12:00 at Auditorium - Machines Thinking about Programs Chair(s): Coen De Roover

Context: Compilation time is an important factor in the adaptability of a software project. Fast recompilation enables cheap experimentation with changes to a project, as those changes can be tested quickly. Separate and incremental compilation has been a topic of interest for a long time to facilitate fast recompilation.

Inquiry: Despite the benefits of an incremental compiler, such compilers are usually not the default. This is because incrementalization requires cross-cutting, complicated, and error-prone techniques such as dependency tracking, caching, cache invalidation, and change detection. Especially in compilers for languages with cross-module definitions and integration, correctly and efficiently implementing an incremental compiler can be a challenge. Retrofitting incrementality into a compiler is even harder. We address this problem by developing a compiler design approach that reuses parts of an existing non-incremental compiler to lower the cost of building an incremental compiler. It also gives an intuition into compiling difficult-to-incrementalize language features through staging.

Approach: We use the compiler design approach presented in this paper to develop an incremental com- piler for the Stratego term-rewriting language. This language has a set of features that at first glance look incompatible with incremental compilation. Therefore, we treat Stratego as our critical case to demonstrate the approach on. We show how this approach decomposes the original compiler and has a solution to com- pile Stratego incrementally. The key idea on which we build our incremental compiler is to internally use an incremental build system to wire together the components we extract from the original compiler.

Knowledge: The resulting compiler is already in use as a replacement of the original whole-program compiler. We find that the incremental build system inside the compiler is a crucial component of our approach. This allows a compiler writer to think in multiple steps of compilation, and combine that into a incremental compiler almost effortlessly. Normally, separate compilation à la C is facilitated by an external build system, where the programmer is responsible for managing dependencies between files. We reuse an existing sound and optimal incremental build system, and integrate its dependency tracking into the compiler.

Grounding: The incremental compiler for Stratego is available as an artefact along with this article. We evaluate it on a large Stratego project to test its performance. The benchmark replays edits to the Stratego project from version control. These benchmarks are part of the artefact, packaged as a virtual machine image for easy reproducibility.

Importance: Although we demonstrate our design approach on the Stratego programming language, we also describe it generally throughout this paper. Many currently used programming languages have a compiler that is much slower than necessary. Our design provides an approach to change this, by reusing an existing compiler and making it incremental within a reasonable amount of time.

Thu 26 Mar

Displayed time zone: Belfast change

11:00 - 12:30
Machines Thinking about ProgramsResearch Papers at Auditorium
Chair(s): Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel
11:00
30m
Research paper
Automatically Tracing Imprecision Causes in JavaScript Static Analysis
Research Papers
Hongki Lee Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Changhee Park KAIST, Sukyoung Ryu KAIST
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
11:30
30m
Research paper
Constructing Hybrid Incremental Compilers for Cross-Module Extensibility with an Internal Build System
Research Papers
Jeff Smits Delft University of Technology, Gabriël Konat Delft University of Technology, Eelco Visser Delft University of Technology
Link to publication DOI Pre-print
12:00
30m
Research paper
Reusing Static Analysis across Different Domain-Specific Languages using Reference Attribute Grammars
Research Papers
Johannes Mey Technische Universität Dresden, Thomas Kühn Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, René Schöne Technische Universität Dresden, Uwe Aßmann TU Dresden, Germany
Link to publication DOI Pre-print