Martin Bravenboer, Eelco Visser. Rewriting Strategies for Instruction Selection. In Sophie Tison, editor, Rewriting Techniques and Applications, 13th International Conference, RTA 2002, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 22-24, 2002, Proceedings. Volume 2378 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 237-251, Springer, 2002. [doi]
Instruction selection (mapping IR trees to machine instructions) can be expressed by means of rewrite rules. Typically, such sets of rewrite rules are highly ambiguous. Therefore, standard rewriting engines based on fixed, exhaustive strategies are not appropriate for the execution of instruction selection. Code generator generators use special purpose implementations employing dynamic programming. In this paper we show how rewriting strategies for instruction selection can be encoded concisely in Stratego, a language for program transformation based on the paradigm of programmable rewriting strategies. This embedding obviates the need for a language dedicated to code generation, and makes it easy to combine code generation with other optimizations.