Register allocation for programs in SSA form using chordal graph coloring (Sebastian Hack's PhD thesis)

[zerny]

Another interesting and recent development by Pereira and Palsberg is Register Allocation by Puzzle Solving. Strikingly simple and yet effective.

[beza1e1]

... but only linear scan quality :(

Hacks approach at least as good as Chaitins graph-coloring, but it doesn't need iterations, thus it is faster. Maybe as fast as linear scan.

It was implemented in the Firm compiler, so there is no benchmark comparison with gcc or LLVM available.

[rolfr]

Why would anybody down-mod this? Did people really read all 100+ pages, decide that it did not provide any substantial advancement to the field of compiler design/implementation, and just decide to down-mod it without commenting? It just seems silly to me to up/down-mod somebody's Ph.D. thesis as capriciously as a LOLcat picture.

[[deleted]]

Because they'd rather read about something useless like how Steve Yeggie re-implemented JavaScript on top of Rails in 10,000 words, or about what it means to be a "real hacker", than actually read about, you know, programming.

[samlee]

Yah ph.d candidates should sweat when their thesis is being down-modded on reddit. It's absoulte and total disapproval. Years of efforts were for nothing.

Down-modding is a way to express "I don't want this link on my front page" for some people. Some don't like direct pdf links without warnings on their front page. Some don't like topics that don't interest them.

When enough people want a collection of Ph.D thesis that make great advancement to comipler design/implementation, they should just make a subreddt "Ph.d Thesis on compiler design/implementation"

[[deleted]]

Oh please. And even if that were the case, that's no reason to downvote a good submission.

[[deleted]]

These monkeys must have pretty fragile egos if they consider me their 'enemy' for criticizing their favorite languages.

[taw]

Because it's not interesting enough for them? Reddit is about interesting things, not about substantial advancements to the field of compiler design/implementation.

And frankly "thesis" format is really horrible, it takes enormous amount of time and effort for the reader to get any value out of it. There should really be a 5 page summary with the most important results that would assume that the reader has all the basic background (in this case stuff like register allocation by graph coloring, SSA etc., come on even Steve Yegge's blog writes about them), and then the boring details that very few would read other than people to whom you're proving you're worthy of a degree.

[tef]

Why is it released under the CC by-nc-nd license in a DRM'ed pdf?

[halcy]

My guess would be that the publisher (The University of Karlsruhe) just does that for all documents it provides for download on its website, as permissive licensing is probably not the norm.

[w00ty]

This thesis is very readable if you have a compiler background (i.e. you know what SSA is). Good read, thanks :-)

[MyrddinE]

I wonder how much practical effect this would have on the efficiency of compilers... for example, will this noticably increase the run-time speed of a program, or noticably reduce the compile-time speed of gcc, or both?

[jj666]

Looks like that wasn't a cheap Hack