Register Promotion in C Programs (1997)
| Venue: | Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI-97 |
| Citations: | 46 - 3 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Cooper97registerpromotion,
author = {Keith D. Cooper and John Lu},
title = {Register Promotion in C Programs},
booktitle = {Proc. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI-97},
year = {1997},
pages = {308--319},
publisher = {ACM Press}
}
Years of Citing Articles
Bookmark
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
OpenURL
Abstract
The combination of pointers and pointer arithmetic in C makes the task of improving C programs somewhat more difficult than improving programs written in simpler languages like Fortran. While much work has been published that focuses on the analysis of pointers, little has appeared that uses the results of such analysis to improve the code compiled for C. This paper examines the problem of register promotion in C and presents experimental results showing that it can have dramatic effects on memory traffic. 1 Introduction The presence of pointer-valued variables in C has long been recognized as an impediment to effective compiletime optimization. Pointers introduce a degree of uncertainty into the results of static analysis. Pointer assignments create multiple names for storage locations, with the result that the compiler must avoid reordering stores to memory. Pointer arithmetic introduces further ambiguity; understanding the results of *(p+8) requires a detailed knowledge, at compil...
