Motivation

Today's high-performance microprocessors rely heavily on compilers to actually deliver their impressive raw computing power to applications. Sophisticated hardware demands a matching, sophisticated compiler.

Every new target architecture requires a new code generator. Implementations of the same target architecture often vary significantly in capability, ranging from microprocessors targeting embedded applications to supercomputing. Consequently, code generators need to be customized to specific processors to fully exploit their capabilities. Likewise, they need to be extended to take advantage of new versions of the architecture.

Requirements for compilers also vary widely. A more traditional, optimizing compiler that runs in a batch process needs a different code generator than a just-in-time compiler for a rapid application development environment.

Developing such code generators by hand is difficult, error prone and expensive. The results are often hard to maintain, hard to customize, and hard to extend.

BEG compiler code generation tool was designed to address these problems.