Extending The Tiger Compiler

The Tiger compiler can easily be extended since it is component-based. Adding a new optimization phase, extending the syntax of the language, or replacing the back-end, is a matter of creating a new component and constructing a new compilation pipeline. This page lists some ideas for extensions.

Language extensions

• Add a module system and separate compilation
• Function arguments (escaping functions)
• Objects
• Add support for XML -- the TigerXML package is a first stab

Compiler improvements

• Garbage collection
• Target different platforms (e.g. Intel)
• Improve spilling heuristics in the register allocator
• Improve stack allocation of escaping variables (overlap variables that are not live at the same time)
• Allocate non-escaping records and arrays on the stack
• Optimization -- first experiments in the TigerOpt package
  • Add data-flow optimizations
  • Add loop optimizations
  • Inline functions
  • Partial evaluation / specialization
• Parallel execution

-- EelcoVisser - 15 Sep 2002