OCEANS: Optimising Compilers for Embedded ApplicatioNS

. This paper presents an overview of the activities carried out within the second year of the ESPRIT project OCEANS whose objective is to combine high and low-level optimisation approaches within an iterative framework for compilation. In this paper we discuss our approach to iterative compilation. 1 Introduction Within the OCEANS project, the consortium intends to design and implement an optimising compiler that utilises aggressive analysis techniques and integrates source-level transformations with low-level, machine dependent optimisations [4, 5]. A major objective is to provide a prototype framework for iterative compilation, where feedback from the low-level is used to guide the selection of a suitable sequence of source-level transformations. In general, compiler optimizations rely on static analysis, simplified processor and cache models and sometimes profiling information. Static analysis and models are necessarily pessimistic approximations. Profile based analysis produ..