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Code Generation and Code optimization:
Content:
1. Types Expression
2. Writing simple type checker
3. Intermediate code generation
4. Intermediate form
5. Syntax tree
6. Three address code
7. Code optimization
8. Compile time evaluation
9. Dead code evaluation
10. Code movement
11. Code generation

Types Expressions: It is a convenient way to express the type of a language

construct. Ait may be defined as follows:
1. It may be a basic type. Thus int, float, char, double are type expressions.
2. T-error is a special basic type which indicates an error during type checking
3. Null is another basic type which indicates that there is no type attached to a
statement.
4. A name of a type is a type expression.
5. A type expression may be formed by applying an operator called a constructor to
other type expression. These constructors include the array, product, struct, pointer and
fuction.

Writing a simple type checker: It checks for type compatibility which essentially finds
out whether two type expressions are equivalent. This type equivalence may be name
equivalence or structural equivalence.

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Intermediate code generation: compiler often generate intermediate code instead of
translating an input file directly to binary. We have seen that it is not always possible
to generate target code for a program in one pass of the compiler due to various
possible reasons which are as follows

1. Sufficient core memory may not be available to accommodate a single pass compiler.
2. A multi pass structure may be required to satisfy the primary aims of the compiler to
generate a highly efficient target code or to occupy minimum possible storage space.

Intermediate Forms: There are several intermediate code forms viz. postfix notation,
syntax trees and three address code. The choice of intermediate code form to be
used in a compiler depends on two important strategy. These are:
1. Ease of conversion from the source program to the intermediate code and.
2. Ease of subsequent processing which is to be done on intermediate code viz.
generation of target code in the simplest manner or program optimization.

Syntax Trees: It is a condensed form of parse tree which is used to represent the
syntactic structure of the language constructs. Operators and keywords are associated
with the interior nodes in a syntax tree and do not appear as leaves.

Construction of syntax trees: A syntax tree an expression may be constructed in a

bottom-up fashion by first creating the leaf nodes for the identifiers and constants
appearing in the expression and then constructing the sub trees for the sub
expressions. An operator node may be created as the root with the operand nodes as

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its children. These child nodes nay represent the sub expression which is constituting
the operands of that operator.

Three Address Code: In three address code, each statement generally contains 3
addresses, two for the operands and one for the result. This is why it is termed as
three address code. It is a sequence having a general form

a: b op c

where op is any operator and a, b and c can be variables, constants or the temporary
variables generated by the compiler. We can say that three address code is a
linearized representation by the following three address code.

t1 : = b * 9

t2 : = a + t1

The commonly used three-address statements are as follows

1. a := b op c, an assignment statement containing a binary operator op which can be

arithmetic or logical operator.
2. a := op b, an assignment statement containing a unary operator op which can be
unary minus, logical negation, conversion operator or shift operator.
3. a := op b, a copy statement which copies the contents of b to a.
4. goto X, an unconditional jump which causes the control flow to execute the three
address instruction with label X as the next instruction.
5. If a relop b goto X, a conditional jump which applies a relational operator, relop, to a
and b, and executes the statement with label X, if the relation is true. If not, the next
statement in the normal flow sequence is executed.
6. If a goto X, a conditional jump which executes the statement with label X, if a is zero.
If not, the next statement in the normal flow sequence is executed.
7. Param a, call p,n and return x, for procedure calls. n indicates the number of
parameters in the call to p.x indicates a returned value and is optional.

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Implementation of the three address code: It can be implemented as records having
fields for the operators and operands. It can be realized in several ways viz.
quadruples and triples.
Triples: It is a record structure having three fields as follows

Operator Operand1 Operand2

Quadruples: It is a record structure having four fields as follows
Operator Operand1 Operand2 result

Where operand1 and operand2 are two operands for the operator and result field
contains the result of the operation on operand1 and operand2.

For example a : =b + c will be represented as

+b c a

Type conversion: In the above generation of three address code for assignment
statements, we assumed that all the operands are of the same type which is not
always possible. In the practice, programming languages allows certain operations on
mixed types. For example C allows a*b, where a is of type real and b is of type
integer. In such cases, the compiler may have to first convert one of the operands to
ensure that both operands are of the same type before generating appropriate code.

It is called coercion, if it is implicit context dependent type conversion done

automatically by the compiler. A type conversion is explicit if it is done by writing a
function in the program.

Code Optimization: the term optimization may be applied to a technique designed to

obtain more efficient object code than would be obtained by simple, straight forward
code generators. Two constraints on the techniques used to perform code
optimizations are

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• They must ensure that the transformed program is semantically equivalent to the
original program.
• The improvement of the program efficiency must be achieved without changing the
algorithms which are used in the programs.

The input program is generally written in a high level language and the output
program can be in a high level language or in a low level language. If both input and
output programs are in high level language, the optimizer is known as source to
source optimizer. If the output is in low level language, the optimizer is known as an
optimizing compiler.

The main goal of optimization is to produce target program with high execution
efficiency. To obtain the best results in a minimum effort we can identify the frequently
executed parts of a program and make them as efficient as possible. Most programs
spend maximum percentage of their execution time in a small fraction of a program. If
we can optimize this small fraction of a program, efficiency may be improved
drastically. It may be obtained by rearranging the computations in a program without
changing the meaning of the program.

Optimization can be done at each level as follows:

• At the source level by the user who can change algorithm or transform loops.
• At the intermediate code level by the compiler which can improve loops, improve
address calculations.
• At the target code level by the compiler which can keep the most heavily used
variables in registers.

Machine Dependent/ Independent Optimization: It can be classified as machine

dependent or machine independent. Machine dependent optimizations exploit
characteristics of the target machine in terms of addressing structures and instructions
set to reduce the amount of code of execution time.
Properties of the operations involved

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• Allocation of scare resources to achieve high efficiency in program execution. Example
the top of stack registers, few arithmetic registers etc.
• Use of immediate instructions where a value is a part of the instruction, incrimination
where a memory location can be incremented by some constant, indexing or
indirection and vector operations are some special machine features that can be
gainfully exploited.
• If data is intermixed with the instruction sequence, it can be accessed more efficiently
on some machines.

Let us consider which illustrates a situation in which we can optimize the code by
using a LOAD COMPLEMENT instruction.

Machine Independent optimization: they are based on the mathematical properties of

a sequence of source statements. An optimization essentially means analyzing the
overall purpose of the statement sequence and finding an equivalent sequence which
can be translated to the minimum code.

Optimizing Transformations: They are provided by an optimizing compiler should have

following properties.

• It should preserve the meaning of programs i.e. it should not change the output
produced by a program for a given input.
• It should speed up programs by a measurable amount on an average.
• It should reduce the size of the program
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Common sub expression elimination: An expression need to be evaluated if it was
previously computed and the values of variables in this expression have not changed
since the earlier computation.
Example , consider the following code
a := b ** c;
d := b** c+ x-y
we can eliminate the second evaluation of b**c from this code if none of the
intervening statements has changed its value. We can thus, rewrite the code as
t1 :=b** c
a=t1
d := t1 + x-y
Let us consider the following code
a := b ** c
b := x;
d := b** c +x – y

we can say that the two expressions are common if

1. They are lexically equivalent i.e. they consist of identical operands connected to each
other by identical operators.
2. They evaluate to identical values i.e. no assignment statements for any of their
operands exist between the evaluations of these expressions.
3. The value of any of the operands used in the expression should not be changed even
due to a procedural call, which might change it as a side effect.

Compile-time evaluation: we can improve the execution efficiency of a program by

shifting execution time actions to compile time so that they are not performed
repeatedly during program execution. We can evaluate an expression with constant
operands at compilation time and replace that expression by a single value. This is
called folding.

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Dead code elimination: If the value contained in the variable at a point is not used
anywhere in the program subsequently, the variable is said to be dead at that place.

Code Movement: The motivation for performing code movement in a program is to

improve the execution time of the program by reducing the evaluation frequently of
expressions. This can be done by moving the evaluation of an expression to other
parts of the program. Let us consider an example
If a<10
b= x 2 – y 2;
Else
b=5;
a=(x 2 – y 2) * 10;
Strength reduction: In frequency reduction transformations we tried to reduce the
execution frequency of expressions by moving the code. There is other class of
transformations which perform equivalent actions indicated in a source program by
reducing the strength of the operators. By strength reduction, we mean replacing the
high strength operator by a low strength operator.

Loop test replacement: We can replace a loop termination test phrased in terms of
one variable by an equivalent loop test phrased in terms of another variable.

Code Generation:
It can be considered as the final phase of compilation. Through post code generation,
the optimization process can be applied on the code, but that can be seen as a part
of code generation phase itself. Code generated by the compiler is an object code of
some lower-level programming language, i.e. assembly language. We have seen that
source code written in a higher-level language is transformed into a lower-level
language that results in a lower-level object code, which should have the following
minimum properties:

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a. It should carry the exact meaning of the source code.
b. It should be efficient in terms of CPU usage and memory management.

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