Hell Oh Entropy!

Mustafa (my manager) knew about my current fascination with learning the _real_ basics of computers (electronics, kernel, compilers, etc.), so he arranged for me to attend the GCC workshop held by IIT Bombay this week. My first reaction was that I would be wasting my time there since I didn't know the first thing about compiler theory and was a novice at best in assembly language programming. He said it wouldn't hurt to try. So I had to try.

I got a chance on the day before the workshop to read up some about things like IRs, RTLs, etc. It was enough that I would not be completely lost from day 1. But I did not attend day 1 at all, thanks to the countrywide strike that crippled all public transport (and some people too). So I spent that day working and also trying to cover what would otherwise have been covered in day 1 -- the various phases of compilation, passes, gray box probing to find out some more about intermediate outputs, etc. I got hold of last year's slides, so it was a little easier.

So I finally made it to days 2, 3 and 4. The first thing I noticed during the lecture sessions was that the professor really knew his stuff. He was well acquainted with the internal layout of gcc and was able to explain it well enough that I really _got_ it. Overall I come out of the sessions today with much more knowledge about gcc than I could ever gain in 4 days on my own. Here are some observations that I made during the course of this session.

The professor really knew his stuff. I say this again so that it does not look like I am ignoring that. There are also a lot of really talented individuals at the GRC, who are doing some pretty interesting research based on gcc. The trouble though is that there seem to have been no efforts whatsoever to share these ideas upstream.

One such idea is the Generic Data Flow Analyzer (GDFA). It is a patch to gcc that provides a data flow analyzer, which can be used to find and eliminate dead code or unused variables. It adds a gimple pass to the compilation sequence and intends to replace the current dead code elimination and unused variable elimination passes with the same code called with different parameters. While the idea is pretty interesting, the sad thing is that there are no signs of an attempt to push this idea upstream. All I could find was an announcement to the gcc mailing list, but no request for comments or for inclusion of the patch.

This is only one of many more ideas that are brewing in the GRC in the minds of some very talented people. But one felt that these ideas were being used only to get degrees and nothing was being done to actually test their feasibility in live production level code. It would be nice to see some of these ideas actually presented upstream with a genuine interest in getting them incorporated.

To conclude, it is a pretty good session for those who want to get started with learning compilers and gcc internals.