A randomized heuristic approach to register allocation

Abstract

We present a randomized algorithm to generate contiguous evaluations for expression DAGs representing basic blocks of straight line code with nearly minimal register need. This heuristic may be used to reorder the statements in a basic block before applying a global register allocation scheme like Graph Coloring. Experiments have shown that the new heuristic produces results which are about 30% better on the average than without reordering.