Open64
From Free net encyclopedia
Open64 is an open source, state-of-art, optimizing compiler for Intel Itanium platform. It was released by SGI company and now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups.
Contents |
Introduction
Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory API OpenMP. It has the capability to conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data flow analysis, data dependence analysis and array region analysis.
The Infrastructure
Its major components are the frontend for C/C++ and Fortran 77/90, Interprocedural analysis (IPA), loop nest optimizer (LNO), global optimizer (WOPT) and code generator (CG).
IR
Five levels of intermediate representation (IR) are used in this compiler to serve as the common interface among all the frontend and backend components.
Limitations
Despite of all its favorite features, there are some limitations in this compiler. First of all, the C/C++ frontend was adopted from gcc 2.96, which is a troublesome unofficial gcc compiler introducing many compatibility problems. Second, it can only generate binary code for Itanium platform. And the worst thing for it is that there is no clear goal for its existence and there are so many separated branches based on it. The most famous one is the Open Research Compiler (ORC) maintained by Intel.