28054

Challenges and Opportunities in C/C++ Source-To-Source Compilation

João Bispo, Nuno Paulino, Luís Miguel Sousa
University of Porto, Portugal
14th Workshop on Parallel Programming and Run-Time Management Techniques for Many-Core Architectures and 12th Workshop on Design Tools and Architectures for Multicore Embedded Computing Platforms (PARMA-DITAM 2023), 2023

@inproceedings{bispo2023challenges,

   title={Challenges and Opportunities in C/C++ Source-To-Source Compilation},

   author={Bispo, Jo{~a}o and Paulino, Nuno and Sousa, Lu{‘i}s Miguel},

   booktitle={14th Workshop on Parallel Programming and Run-Time Management Techniques for Many-Core Architectures and 12th Workshop on Design Tools and Architectures for Multicore Embedded Computing Platforms (PARMA-DITAM 2023)},

   year={2023},

   organization={Schloss Dagstuhl-Leibniz-Zentrum f{"u}r Informatik}

}

The C/C++ compilation stack (Intermediate Representations (IRs), compilation passes and backends) is encumbered by a steep learning curve, which we believe can be lowered by complementing it with approaches such as source-to-source compilation. Source-to-source compilation is a technology that is widely used and quite mature in certain programming environments, such as JavaScript, but that faces a low adoption rate in others. In the particular case of C and C++ some of the identified factors include the high complexity of the languages, increased difficulty in building and maintaining C/C++ parsers, or limitations on using source code as an intermediate representation. Additionally, new technologies such as Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) have appeared as potential competitors to source-to-source compilers at this level. In this paper, we present what we have identified as current challenges of source-to-source compilation of C and C++, as well as what we consider to be opportunities and possible directions forward. We also present several examples, implemented on top of the Clava source-to-source compiler, that use some of these ideas and techniques to raise the abstraction level of compiler research on complex compiled languages such as C or C++. The examples include automatic parallelization of for loops, high-level synthesis optimisation, hardware/software partitioning with run-time decisions, and automatic insertion of inline assembly for fast prototyping of custom instructions.
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