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Awesome comment! Quick follow-up question: "If you've never read up on Frances Allen, she's amazing and basically created the field of automatic program optimi

Awesome comment! Quick follow-up question: "If you've never read up on Frances Allen, she's amazing and basically created the field of automatic program optimization. As she would tell you, it builds on a lot of pieces of work of others, but ... The papers she wrote are completely approachable and still relevant today." I've never heard of her or maybe just saw Allen on a paper. Which are the must-read works so I can catch up and share them with others?

chubot 8y ago
I remember her from the provocative comments in the interview quoted here. She said the C language was horrible for the the field of optimizing compilers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581319 By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  To build on top of this. Here is the PL.8 paper, the PL/I variant that IBM used for their RISC research. "An overview of the PL.8 compiler" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.5277&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453... An optimizing compiler that is pretty much LLVM in 1982.
DannyBee 8y ago
Her paper on control flow analyis written in 1970 is a better intro to flow analysis than most compiler books you will find today (IMHO): http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~suman/secure_sw_devel/p1-allen.pdf http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~suman/secure_sw_devel/p1-allen.p... Though it covers intervals, which no longer are used due to other abstractions being found to be better later on.

chubot 8y ago

I remember her from the provocative comments in the interview quoted here. She said the C language was horrible for the the field of optimizing compilers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15581319 By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine.

pjmlp 8y ago
To build on top of this. Here is the PL.8 paper, the PL/I variant that IBM used for their RISC research. "An overview of the PL.8 compiler" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453.5277&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.453... An optimizing compiler that is pretty much LLVM in 1982.

DannyBee 8y ago

Her paper on control flow analyis written in 1970 is a better intro to flow analysis than most compiler books you will find today (IMHO): http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~suman/secure_sw_devel/p1-allen.pdf http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~suman/secure_sw_devel/p1-allen.p... Though it covers intervals, which no longer are used due to other abstractions being found to be better later on.