Code Transformation

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Develop AST re-writing algorithms to transform and optimise code
• Design ASTs to capture a target language or DSL
• Construct grammars to parse existing languages

Subject Specific Practical Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Create a source-to-source code translator
• Implement a parser for a context-free language
• Create a compiler from an existing imperative language to a given instruction set
• Develop test and verification infrastructure to support development and optimisation

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Identify the advantages and disadvantages of compiler, interpreted, and embedded languages.
• Explain how high-level language constructs are lowered into instruction sequences
• Describe common compiler optimisations and predict how it might affect high-level code.
• Theory of grammars and parsing automata

Languages:

• Grammars (follows on from RegEx in yr1)
• Parsers
• ASTs

Language processors:

• Interpreters
• Transformers (source to source)
• DSLs and Metaprogramming

Compilation:

• Mapping expression evaluation into instructions
• Converting control-flow statements into instructions
• Functions, stacks, and frames

Modern compilers:

• Optimisation
• Register allocation
• Intermediate Representations
• Basic Blocks & SSA

• Lectures
• Guided self-study
• Computing labs

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.