CSE 359 - Compiler Design

Lecture 1: Introduction
• Aims:
– Any program written in a programming language must
be translated before it can be executed.
– This translation is typically accomplished by a
software system called compiler.
– This course aims to introduce students to the principles
and techniques used to perform this translation and
the issues that arise in the construction of a compiler.

CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 1

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 Learning Outcomes:
 A student successfully completing this course should be able
to:
 understand the principles governing all phases of the
compilation process.
 understand the role of each of the basic components of a
standard compiler.
 show awareness of the problems of and methods and
techniques applied to each phase of the compilation process.
 apply standard techniques to solve basic problems that arise in
compiler construction.
 understand how the compiler can take advantage of particular
processor characteristics to generate good code.

CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 2

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 Course Texts

• Aho, Lam, Sethi, Ullman. “Compilers: Principles, Techniques and

Tools”, 2nd edition. (Aho2) The 1st edition (by Aho, Sethi, Ullman –
Aho1), the “Dragon Book”, has been a classic for over 20 years.

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 Syllabus
Introduction to compilers: Introductory concepts, types of compilers,
applications, phases of a compiler.
Lexical analysis: Role of the lexical analyzer, input buffering, token
specification, recognition of tokens, symbol tables.
Parsing: Parser and its role, context free grammars, top-down parsing.
Syntax-directed translation: Syntax-directed definitions, construction of syntax
trees, top-down translation.
Type checking: Type systems, type expressions, static and dynamic checking of
types, error recovery.
Run-time organization: Run-time storage organization, storage strategies.
Intermediate code generation: Intermediate languages, declarations, assignment
statements.
Code optimization: Basic concepts of code optimization, principal sources of
optimization.
Code generation.
Features of some common compilers: Characteristic features of C, Pascal and
Fortran compilers.
CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 4
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CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 5
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 Definitions Source program
compiler

What is a compiler? Target program

 A program that accepts as input a program text in a certain
language and produces as output a program text in another
language, while preserving the meaning of that text (Grune et al,
2000).
 A program that reads a program written in one language (source
language) and translates it into an equivalent program in another
language (target language) (Aho et al)
What is an interpreter?
 A program that reads a source program and produces the results of
executing this source.

We deal with compilers! Many of these issues arise with interpreters!

CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 6

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CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 7
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 Examples
• C is typically compiled
• Lisp is typically interpreted
• Java is compiled to bytecodes, which are then
interpreted
Also:
• C++ to Intel Core 2/.../Assembly
• C++ to C
• High Performance Fortran (HPF) to Fortran (parallelising
compiler)
• C to C (or any language to itself)

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 Qualities of a Good Compiler
What qualities would you want in a compiler?
– generates correct code (first and foremost!)
– generates fast code
– conforms to the specifications of the input language
– copes with essentially arbitrary input size, variables, etc.
– compilation time (linearly) proportional to size of source
– good diagnostics
– consistent optimisations
– works well with the debugger

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 Principles of Compilation
The compiler must:
• preserve the meaning of the program being compiled.
• “improve” the source code in some way.
Other issues (depending on the setting):
• Speed (of compiled code)
• Space (size of compiled code)
• Feedback (information provided to the user)
• Debugging (transformations obscure the relationship source
code vs target)
• Compilation time efficiency (fast or slow compiler?)

CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 10

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Why study Compilation Technology?
• Success stories (one of the earliest branches in CS)
– Applying theory to practice (scanning, parsing, static analysis)
– Many practical applications have embedded languages (eg, tags)
• Practical algorithmic & engineering issues:
– Approximating really hard (and interesting!) problems
– Emphasis on efficiency and scalability
– Small issues can be important!
• Ideas from different parts of computer science are involved:
• AI: Heuristic search techniques; greedy algorithms - Algorithms: graph
algorithms - Theory: pattern matching - Also: Systems, Architecture
• Compiler construction can be challenging and fun:
– new architectures always create new challenges; success requires
mastery of complex interactions; results are useful; opportunity to
achieve performance.
CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 11
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 Uses of Compiler Technology
• Most common use: translate a high-level program to object code
– Program Translation: binary translation, hardware synthesis, …
• Optimizations for computer architectures:
– Improve program performance, take into account hardware parallelism, etc…
• Automatic parallelisation or vectorisation
• Performance instrumentation: e.g., -pg option of cc or gcc
• Interpreters: e.g., Python, Ruby, Perl, Matlab, sh, …
• Software productivity tools
– Debugging aids: e.g, purify
• Security: Java VM uses compiler analysis to prove “safety” of Java
code.
• Text formatters, just-in-time compilation for Java, power
management, global distributed computing, …
Key: Ability to extract properties of a source program (analysis) and
transform it to construct a target program (synthesis)
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 Summary
• A compiler is a program that converts some input
text in a source language to output in a target
language.
• Compiler construction poses some of the most
challenging problems in computer science.

• Next lecture: structure of a typical compiler.

CSE 359 - Compiler Masud Ibn Afjal, CSE, HSTU 13

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