Register allocation by proof transformation

  • Authors:

  • Atsushi Ohori

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Tatsunokuchi, Ishikawa, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ESOP'03 Proceedings of the 12th European conference on Programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a proof-theoretical framework that accounts for the entire process of register allocation - liveness analysis is proof reconstruction (similar to type inference), and register allocation is proof transformation from a proof system with unrestricted variable accesses to a proof system with restricted variable access. In our framework, the set of registers acts as a "working set" of the live variables at each instruction step, which changes during the execution of the code. This eliminates the ad-hoc notion of "spilling". The necessary memoryregister moves are systematically incorporated in our proof transformation process. Its correctness is a direct corollary of our construction; the resulting proof is equivalent to the proof of the original code modulo treatment of structural rules. The framework yields a clean and powerful register allocation algorithm. The algorithm has been implemented, demonstrating the feasibility of the framework.