CS 265: Compiler Optimization

Welcome to CS 265, Fall 2024 edition!

• Instructor: Max Willsey
• Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00pm-3:30pm
• Location: Soda 405
• Office hours: After class (TTh 3:30-4:30pm), 725 Soda

This course uses my fork of the bril compiler infrastructure.

Some students have opted to make their projects public! Check them out here!

Other Course Pages

• bCourses/Canvas (enrollment required)
• Syllabus
• Project Information
• Bril (Max's fork)

Schedule

Schedule is under construction and subject to change.

If the topic says "OH, no class", that means I will be available during the normal class time for office hours, in addition to the normal office hours after class.

Week	Date	Topic	Due
1	Aug 29	Overview
2	Sep 3	Local Optimizations	Course Survey (bCourses)
	Sep 5	Local Optimizations
3	Sep 10	Dataflow
	Sep 12	no class
4	Sep 17	Dataflow	Task 1 due
	Sep 19	"Constant Propagation with Conditional Branches"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
5	Sep 24	SSA
	Sep 26	"Simple and Efficient Construction of Static Single Assignment Form"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
6	Oct 1	Loops	Task 2 due
	Oct 3	"Lazy Code Motion"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
7	Oct 8	Loops
	Oct 10	"Beyond Induction Variables"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
8	Oct 15	Memory	Task 3 due
	Oct 17	"Strictly Declarative Specification of Sophisticated Points-to Analyses"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
9	Oct 22	Interprocedural Optimization
	Oct 24	"Understanding and exploiting optimal function inlining"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
10	Oct 29	OH, no class	Task 4 due
	Oct 31	"Intermediate Representations in Imperative Compilers: A Survey"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
11	Nov 5	Election day, no class	Project Proposals
	Nov 7	"BuildIt: A Type-Based Multi-stage Programming Framework for Code Generation in C++"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
12	Nov 12	no class
	Nov 14	"Copy-and-patch compilation"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
13	Nov 19	no class, extra OH
	Nov 21	"Linear Scan Register Allocation on SSA Form"	Reading reflection (bCourses)
14	Nov 26	no class, no OH	Project Check-ins due
	Nov 28	no class, no OH
15	Dec 3	no class
	Dec 5	"
16	Dec 10	RRR, no class
	Dec 12	"
17	Dec 17	Finals Week	Project Reports

Resources

These notes are by no means meant to be a comprehensive resource for the course. Here are some other resources (all freely available online) that you may find helpful. I have looked at many of these resources in preparing this class, and I recommend them for further reading.

• Other courses
  • CMU's 15-411 by Frank Pfenning (notes); 15-745 by Phil Gibbons (slides)
  • Cornell's CS 6120 by Adrian Sampson (videos)
  • Stanford's CS 243 by Monica Lam (slides)
• The book Static Program Analysis by Anders Møller and Michael I. Schwartzbach (available online for free).
• The survey paper "Compiler transformations for high-performance computing" (1994) for a comprehensive look at many parts of an optimizing compiler, especially loop transformations.