Cicero Compiler CPP

Compiler for translating Regular Expressions (REs) into a domain specific ISA for Cicero.

Build with Docker

The simplest way to build the compiler is by using Docker. Docker/Dockerfile is provided to build the image:

# Build docker image which contains build dependencies
docker build -t cicero_build_environment:latest Docker

# Run build and test within docker image
docker run -v $PWD:/app cicero_build_environment:latest /bin/bash /app/Docker/build_and_test.sh

Build manually

Install dependencies first:

# Ubuntu Linux
# Add LLVM apt repository, follow instruction on https://apt.llvm.org/
apt install libmlir-16-dev mlir-16-tools llvm-16-dev antlr4 libantlr4-runtime-dev cmake

# Fedora Linux
dnf install cmake antlr4 antlr4-cpp-runtime-devel mlir-devel llvm-devel

1. cmake: cross platform build file generator
2. antlr4: tool for building parser/lexer from declarative grammar/tokens
3. antlr4-cpp-runtime-devel: C++ runtime for antlr4
4. mlir-devel: intermediate representation library
5. llvm-devel: compiler infrastructure library

Once dependencies are installed, clone this repo and cd into it:

mkdir build
cd build
# Optional, only if you want to build tests
git submodule update --init --recursive
# If you don't want to build tests, add `-DBUILD_TESTING=OFF` to the next command
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Usage

Once built, the compiler executable can be found in ./build/ciceroc.

To compiler an example ab|cd RE into out.cicero, enabling all optimizations, you can run:

./build/ciceroc --regex="ab|cd" --emit=compiled -o out.cicero -Oall

Different output targets can be achieved by specifying one of the available options: --emit=regexmlir|ciceromlir|ciceromlir.dot|compiled.

Optimizations can be enabled all together (-Oall), or one by one: -Oregex, -Oregexboundary, -Ojump.

Output binary can be inspected using ./build/objdump binary.cicero

Paper Citation

If you find this repository useful, please use the following citations:

@inproceedings{somaini2025cicero,
    title = {Combining MLIR Dialects with Domain-Specific Architecture for Efficient Regular Expression Matching},
    author = {Andrea Somaini and Filippo Carloni and Giovanni Agosta and Marco D. Santambrogio and Davide Conficconi},
    year = 2025,
    month = {mar},
    booktitle={2025 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)}
 }