CMSC 22620
Implementation of Computer Languages - II
Spring 2015

General Information

Instructor:    John Reppy Ry 256
TA: Lamont Samuels   
Lecture: TR 10:30-11:50 Ry 251

Overview

This course is a continuation of CMSC 22610 and deals with the optimization and code-generation phases of a compiler. We will cover intermediate representations and basic optimizations, dataflow analysis, instruction selection, and register allocation. There will be light homework and a final exam, but main body of required work will be the course project.

Text books

The main text for the course is

Title: Modern Compiler Implementation in ML
Author: Andrew Appel
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press, 1998
Errata: www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/modern/ml/errata.html

The programming assignments will be written using the SML programming language. The following book is one of the better introductions to SML programming.

Title: ML for the Working Programmer (2nd Edition)
Authors: L.C. Paulson
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press, 1996

The following reference may also be useful:

Title: The Standard ML Library
Editors: Emden Gansner and John Reppy
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press, 2004

Course project

The course project is a continuation of the CMSC 22610 project and will involve extending the FLang language with some additional features, generating native code using the LLVM infrastructure, and implementing various optimizations. to implement a higher-order functional language The project will be divided into four parts with the following tentative due dates:
Apr 15:Project 1 — Extending the Flang Front End
Apr 27:Project 2 — Conversion to LambdaIR
May 13:Project 3 — Closure conversion
June 10:Project 4 — Flang optimization

Project handouts

Project handouts are available online from the following links:
Project overview
The Flang Type System
Project 1 — Extending the Flang Front End
Project 2 — Conversion to LambdaIR [Revised 2015-04-24]
Project 3 — Closure conversion
Project 4 — Flang optimization

Additional project resources

Sample programs with AST, Simplified AST, LambdaIR, and Cluster output (examples.tgz)

Resources

You will find the following software and documentation useful for programming the projects:

Academic Honesty

[The following is owed to Stuart Kurtz]

The University of Chicago is a scholarly academic community. You need to both understand and internalize the ethics of our community. A good place to start is with the Cadet's Honor Code of the US Military Academy: "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do." It is important to understand that the notion of property that matters most to academics is ideas, and that to pass someone else's ideas off as your own is to lie, cheat, and steal.

The University has a formal policy on Academic Honesty, which is somewhat more verbose than West Point's. Even so, you should read and understand it.

We believe that student interactions are an important and useful means to mastery of the material. We recommend that you discuss the material in this class with other students, and that includes the homework assignments. So what is the boundary between acceptable collaboration and academic misconduct? First, while it is acceptable to discuss homework, it is not acceptable to turn in someone else's work as your own. When the time comes to write down your answer, you should write it down yourself from your own memory. Moreover, you should cite any material discussions, or written sources, e.g.,

Note: I discussed this exercise with Jane Smith.

The University's policy, for its relative length, says less than it should regarding the culpability of those who know of misconduct by others, but do not report it. An all too common case has been where one student has decided to "help" another student by giving them a copy of their assignment, only to have that other student copy it and turn it in. In such cases, we view both students as culpable and pursue disciplinary sanctions against both.

For the student collaborations, it can be a slippery slope that leads from sanctioned collaboration to outright misconduct. But for all the slipperyness, there is a clear line: present only your ideas as yours and attribute all others.

If you have any questions about what is or is not proper academic conduct, please ask your instructors.


Last revised: May 21, 2015