Evaluation of Automatically-Generated Compilers

Compilers or language translators can be generated using a variety of formal specification techniques. Whether generation is worthwhile depends on the effort required to specify the translation task and the quality of the generated compiler. This paper reports the results from a systematic comparison of a hand-coded translator for the Icon programming language with one generated by the Eli compiler construction system. A direct comparison can be made since the generated program performs the same translation as the hand-coded program. The results of the comparison show that efficient compilers can be generated from specifications that are much smaller and more problem-oriented than the equivalent source code. We also show that further work must be done to reduce the dynamic memory usage of generated compilers.