Overview of metaheuristics methods in compilation

Abstract

Compilers are nowadays fundamental tools for the development of any kind of application. However, their task gets increasingly difficult due to the constant increase in the complexity of modern computer architecture, as well as to the increased requirements imposed upon programming languages by the great diversity of applications handled at present. In the compilation process several optimization problems must be solved, some of them belonging to the NP-Hard class. The quality of the solution found for these problems has direct impact over the quality of the generated object code. To solve them, compilers do it locally through naive heuristics which might consequently lead to solutions that are far from optimal. Knowing that metaheuristics methods have recently been used massively and successfully to solve combinatorial optimization problems, similar performance in the problems found in the compilation process can be expected beforehand. Following this line of reasoning, such problems are presented in this paper and the potential use of metaheuristics techniques to find their solutions is analyzed. A review is also made of the work that has been done in this field, and finally a proposal is made of the road that this development should follow. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.