Reference Materials

This page contains a number of useful and/or interesting references selected by the staff. You are not expected to know most of the material on this page for quizzes or for implementing your compiler; however, you may find it interesting and helpful.

This page is continually being updated, so check back regularly for new material.

Official References

• Decaf language spec
• x64 Cheat Sheet - Lists and tables detailing registers and assembly commands.*
• Introduction to x86-64 Assembly - More information on registers and some assembly examples.*
• x86_64 architecture guide
• The complete Intel x64 manual
• Intel x64 Optimization Reference Manual
• For project handouts, see the schedule.

Unofficial References

(Interesting blog posts, papers, etc)

Overviews:

• LLVM compiler architecture
• GCC compiler architecture

Blogs:

• Russ Cox's Blog - Russ is one of the developers of Google Go, a pretty interesting language.
• Ian Wienand's Blog - Whoever he is, he writes about compiler and language internals, the magic black box that is the linker, and more.
• Matt Might's Blog - Matt is a professor at the University of Utah and has written some very interesting articles (e.g. "Yacc is dead").

Papers:

• Register allocation & spilling via graph coloring - G.J. Chaitin / 1982. Great (short) paper on simple register allocation.
• Iterated register coalescing - Lal George / 1996. Presents improvements / alternative to Chaitin's design. If Chaitin(+/-Briggs) -style register allocation isn't enough for you, this paper is a good read - actually, it's a good read anyway, to understand the tradeoffs.
• Superword Level Parallelism - Combined with loop unrolling, a simple way to implement a vectorizing compiler.

Misc:

• Scala Patterns for Compiler Design
• 6.823 (Advanced Computer Architecture) lecture notes

* - Provided during exams.

Top // 6.035 home // Last updated Wednesday, 05-Sep-2018 09:27:34 EDT