A provably sound TAL for back-end optimization

Typed assembly languages provide a way to generate machine-checkable safety proofs for machine-language programs. But the soundness proofs of most existing typed assembly lan-guages are hand-written and cannot be machine-checked, which is worrisome for such large calculi. We have de-signed and implemented a low-level typed assembly language (LTAL) with a semantic model and established its soundness from the model. Compared to existing typed assembly lan-guages, LTAL is more scalable and more secure; it has no macro instructions that hinder low-level optimizations such as instruction scheduling; its type constructors are expres-sive enough to capture data ow information, support the compiler's choice of data representations and permit typed position-independent code; and its type-checking algorithm is completely syntax-directed. We have built a prototype system, based on Standard ML of New Jersey, that compiles most of core ML to Sparc code. We explain how we were able to make the untyped back end in SML/NJ preserve types during instruction selection and register allocation, without restricting low-level optimiza-tions and without knowledge of any type system pervading the instruction selector and register allocator