Engineering a Compiler, 2nd Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

The practice of compiler construction changes continually, in part because the designs of processors and systems change. For example, when we began to write Engineering a Compiler ( eac) in 1998, some of our colleagues questioned the wisdom of including a chapter on instruction scheduling because out-of-order execution threatened to make scheduling largely irrelevant. Today, as the second edition goes to press, the rise of multicore processors and the push for more cores has made in-order execution pipelines attractive again because their smaller footprints allow the designer to place more cores on a chip. Instruction scheduling will remain important for the near-term future.

At the same time, the compiler construction ...