The proliferation of high-performance microprocessors in recent years has made the development of systems software, such as compilers, assemblers, linkers, debuggers, simulators, and other related tools, more challenging than ever. Despite their wide use in retargetable compilation systems, machine descriptions have seldom been used in other systems software. One reason is that machine descriptions tend to be application dependent. In this paper, we show how software can share descriptions that still contain application dependencies by using a new description framework called CSDL. 1 Introduction For many years, compilers have used machine descriptions to capture details about the target machine. By using machine descriptions, target-specific information is isolated from the rest of the implementation so that it may easily be examined and changed. Despite their broad use in compilers, machine descriptions have seldom been used by other systems software such as linkers, debugger...