Tutorial Proposal for GCC Summit

[Uday Khedker <uday@cse.iitb.ac.in>]

Dear Friends,

I have submitted  a tutorial proposal for GCC Summit.  This email to get
an idea  of whether this  tutorial will be  of interest to  a sufficient
number  of people.  We have  been conducting  expanded versions  of this
tutorial  in India  for past  few years  and it  seems to  generate some
interest. Some friends in US suggested  that we should hold some version
outside of India hence I have sent in a proposal to GCC Summit.

Looking  forward to  getting some  feedback. I  would also  be happy  to
modify the tutorial based on the feedback.

Thanks and regards,

Uday.
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Dr. Uday Khedker
Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engg.
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India.
email   : uday@cse.iitb.ac.in
homepage: http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday
phone   : Office - 91 (22) 2576 7717
           Res.   - 91 (22) 2576 8717, 91 (22) 2572 0288
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                Tutorial on Essential Abstractions in GCC
                -----------------------------------------

Motivation:
-----------

Most  explanations of  GCC which  are publicly  available describe  many
details and tend  to be heavy on information rather  than insights. As a
consequence, a clear  and crisp explanation of the journey  from a given
machine description to  an actual run of a compiler  generated from that
machine description is not available.

In  this  tutorial  we   describe  some  carefully  chosen  abstractions
that  help  one to  understand  the  retargetability mechanism  and  the
architecture of the  compiler generation framework of GCC  and relate it
to a generated compiler.


Coverage
--------

The  default duration  of this  tutorial is  one day  and it  covers the
following  topics:  Meeting  the  challenge of  understanding  GCC.  The
architecture of GCC.  Basic concepts in GCC  configuration and building.
The  structure  of  a  GCC  generated  compiler.  Plugins  structure  of
GCC.  First  level  graybox  probing  of  the  compilation  sequence  of
a  GCC  generated  compiler.  Graybox probing  for  machine  independent
optimizations.  Graybox probing  for parallelization  and vectorization.
Adding Gimple and RTL passes to GCC. The retargetability and instruction
selection  mechanism of  GCC.  Designing and  understanding GCC  machine
descriptions.  The   abstractions  in   GCC  machine   descriptions  and
their  influence on  a  compiler  generated from  them.  The design  and
implementation of gdfa (generic data flow analyzer) for GCC.

We have held  several tutorials and workshops along these  lines in past
few years in India and now would like to reach out to a larger audience.

Our main  source of material  is the Workshop on  Essential Abstractions
in  GCC   held  at  IIT   Bombay  from  5th   July  to  8th   July  2010
(http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/grc/gcc-workshop-10).

Target Audience
---------------

People interested  in using  GCC for  their research  as well  as people
interested in contributing to GCC will benefit a lot from this tutorial.
It is expected that this tutorial will  bring down the ramp up period of
novices  to GCC  from several  frustrating months  to a  few stimulating
weeks. This tutorial  will also be useful for people  who are interested
in  relating  class  room  concepts  of compilation  to  a  large  scale
practical compiler which is widely used.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Uday Khedker
Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engg.
IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400 076, India.
email   : uday@cse.iitb.ac.in
homepage: http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~uday
phone   : Office - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 7717, 91 (22) 2576 7717 (Direct)
           Res.   - 91 (22) 2572 2545 x 8717, 91 (22) 2576 8717 (Direct)
----------------------------------------------------------------------