Extensible and Extension-Oriented Compilers

Today’s system programmers go to great lengths to extend the languages in which they program. For instance, system-specific compilers find errors in Linux and other systems, and add support for specialized control flow to Qt and event-based programs. These compilers are difficult to build and cannot always understand each other’s language changes. However, they can greatly improve code understandability and correctness, advantages that should be accessible to all programmers. This thesis considers four extensible and extension-oriented compilers: CIL, Polyglot, xtc, and Xoc. These four compilers represent four distinctly different approaches to the problem of bridging the gap between language design and system implementation. Taking an extension author’s point of view, this thesis compares the design of each compiler’s extension interface in terms of extension structure, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, and rewriting