Development of a Simula front-end to GCC

Abstract

The report describes the process of designing, building and evaluating a Simula compiler based directly on the multi-platform optimization and code generation framework of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Utilization of this framework, known as the GCC back-end, enables this Simula implementation to generate good-quality assembler code for the variety of machine platforms that are supported by GCC.

The interface provided by the GCC back-end is more flexible than the C language and therefore provides certain advantages when expressing the semantics of Simula to the low-level optimization machinery of the GCC back-end.

Accommodation of Simula's coroutine feature poses a particular challenges on the GCC back-end with respect to the heap-based activation records that become necessary. Extensive preallocation of activation records reduces the number of heap allocations and improves run-time performance at the expense of memory parsimony.