The New Framework for Loop Nest Optimization in GCC: from Prototyping to Evaluation

This paper presents a practical prototyping tool for SSA transformations based on PROLOG, and a case study of its applicability using the New Framework for Loop Nest Optimization of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Using this approach, we implemented an induction variable analysis in GCC and performed several experiments for assessing different issues: performance of the generated code, effectiveness of the analyzers and optimizers, compilation overhead, together with possible improvements. This evaluation, based on the SPEC CPU2000, MiBench and JavaGrande benchmarks on different architectures, suggests that our framework could be of valuable use in production compilers developments such as GCC.