Better Optimiziers?

[Mark.Tucker at cmu-cs-gandalf.arpa]

Yes, its a shame that anyone who wants better code than the portable c
compiler wants to give you has to start from scratch.

	A recent CACM talked about the Amsterdam compiler kit.  They
claim to build machine independent optimizers and machine dependent
code generators for a nice tree-based intermediate language.   Their
intermediate representation is designed for optimization.

I'd like to see a completely public domain C compiler built with their
system.  By starting with their stuff, you wouldn't need to worry
about breaking 'old reliable.'

Another publicly availible optimizer is PO, written by Jack Davidson
(now at the University of Virginia).  It takes
register-transfer-level code descriptions and does nice value
propogation / common sub-expression elimination.  Unfortunately, 
it's slow, and doesn't work with trees, but seems to be easily
retargeted to other machines.

-- Mark Tucker