Automating Instruction Selector Generation in Jikes RVM

As the compiler evolve with the modern technology, general tools to easily develop compiler architecture becomes a necessity, especially for architectural and IR extensions. While there are existing general and framework-independent tools for compiler front-end, such tools do not exist for back end. Such tools for back-end generation is difficult because it will need to work for a wide variety of intermediate representations (IRs) and targets. For this, we propose Gist, a universal program that takes in a com-piler IR and a machine instruction set architecture and generate general instruction selection patterns that can then be adapted to any compiler framework. More specifically, the focus of this paper is on generation instruction selectors for Jikes RVM baseline compiler and PowerPC archi-tecture.