The visual development of GCC plug-ins with GDE

Being able to directly affect code compilation with code transformations allows the seamless addition of custom optimizations and specialized functionality to code at compile time. Traditionally, this has only been possible by directly modifying compiler source code: a very difficult task. Using GCC plug-ins, developers can directly affect code compilation, without actually modifying the source code of GCC. While this makes applying a completed plug-in easy, plug-in development is transformation development nonetheless: an arduous task. The plug-in developer is required to have the same thorough understanding of compiler internals, complex compiler internal representations, and non-trivial source to internal representation mappings as any other transformation developer. Recently, simplified representations, such as CIL, have been developed to help developers overcome some transformation design challenges. Although useful in their own respect, representations like CIL are often language specific by design. This requires the developer to make the unfortunate choice between relative ease of development on a simplified representation or language generality on a more complex representation. We have developed a visual approach to transformation development consisting of a two components: a plugin to extract GCC's intermediate representation and a Java-based tool to visualize it. This thesis demonstrates how our visual technique significantly reduces many of the problems facing transformation development without sacrificing the inherent benefits of a more generalized intermediate representation.