Trying to build a more hackable compiler...

[Jonathan Gibbons]

You can already disable (or not enable) the "unnecessary" checks with 
the -Xlint option.
In general, the rest of the semantic "checks" are necessary for javac to 
figure out the
meaning of your programs.

Did you have any semantic checks or performance issues in mind?

-- Jon


On 05/09/2016 01:26 AM, Wieland, Jacob wrote:
>
> If you take suggestions, give the compiler the option to generate-bytecode-only (i.e. turn off all unnecessary semantic checks). This would solve a lot of performance issues I have when compiling generated java-surce-code (that I know is semantically correct, so semantic checks produce only warmth and consume time).
>
>
>
> Dr. Jacob Wieland
> Senior Software Engineer
> ________________________________________
> From: compiler-dev <compiler-dev-bounces at openjdk.java.net> on behalf of Robert Olofsson <robert.olofsson at khelekore.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2016 8:08:19 PM
> To: compiler-dev at openjdk.java.net
> Subject: Trying to build a more hackable compiler...
>
> Hi!
>
> Some time ago I started reading the code for javac and I realized that
> it is not a project that is easy to work on. I also realized that there
> are other people that want a compiler that is easier to hack. A few
> of the things that are requested are:
> * Grammar based parser
> * Better multi threading
>
> I did try to make a few patches for javac to at least make it better
> multi threaded, but realized that this was really hard to do, at
> least for the code I looked at. Too much global state in the lexer
> and parser.
>
> I realized that I actually did take a few compiler related courses
> so time to build something on my own, as a proof of concept. In case
> you want to take a look: https://github.com/robert-olofsson/parjac
>
> Initial thoughts:
> * Making lexing + parsing run in parallel is easy
> * Setting classes on types in parallel is easy
> * Checking other semantics in parallel is easy
> * Writing bytecode in parallel is easy
>
> Parsing a reasonably big code tree (27195 files with
> 11022 of them being java) and outputting class files
> containing hello-world like methods with the correct signatures
> is quite a lot faster than javac doing a full compile and my
> computer is a nuc i7, so not many cores.
> Sure, this is a bit of apples vs oranges, but it still
> indicates that it is quite possible to fulfill the wishes
> of a grammar based multi threaded compiler. The heavy
> part is currently parsing.
>
> I do know of the antlr-javac experiment, but it seems to
> have died, not sure what will happen to it. My experiments
> with antlr indicated that it is too hard to use for a java 8
> grammar and it seems like it ended up being slower than
> ordinary javac.
>
> If this is considered advertising a non javac-compiler I do
> apologize, my end goal is to make javac (based on current code or some
> other code) be a better compiler and for now I only want to show that it
> seems possible to make it better.
>
> /robo
>
>
>
>
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