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Code Generation in the Columbia Esterel Compiler

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems volume 2007, Article number: 052651 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

The synchronous language Esterel provides deterministic concurrency by adopting a semantics in which threads march in step with a global clock and communicate in a very disciplined way. Its expressive power comes at a cost, however: it is a difficult language to compile into machine code for standard von Neumann processors. The open-source Columbia Esterel Compiler is a research vehicle for experimenting with new code generation techniques for the language. Providing a front-end and a fairly generic concurrent intermediate representation, a variety of back-ends have been developed. We present three of the most mature ones, which are based on program dependence graphs, dynamic lists, and a virtual machine. After describing the very different algorithms used in each of these techniques, we present experimental results that compares twenty-four benchmarks generated by eight different compilation techniques running on seven different processors.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Stephen A Edwards & Jia Zeng

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  1. Stephen A Edwards
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  2. Jia Zeng
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Correspondence to Stephen A Edwards.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Edwards, S.A., Zeng, J. Code Generation in the Columbia Esterel Compiler. J Embedded Systems 2007, 052651 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/52651

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