Research Activities

Today's computers are so powerful that most compilations complete in a few seconds. Those of you who remember compiling at 50 lines per minute on a VAX 780 will be glad those days are gone forever. However, you may ask if there is some way of getting more benefit from a 2GHz 1GByte PC.

We have long known that compilers are best written in a high-level programming language. While there are no commonly used languages designed for writing compilers, there are functional and logic languages that are considerably better than C.

In the past, it was not possible to write a production-quality compiler in such languages. We tried in 1987. The outcome was a product that was too big for a PC and too slow for project use. We believe this is no longer the case, and we are building a demonstration compiler:

Compared with current technology, where an Ada compiler is more than one million lines of code, a new technology compiler will be less than 20,000 lines. That is 1/50 th of the size. The current demonstrator is approximately10,000 lines, and that includes an assembler and linker.

Beyond the demonstrator, we require funding to build a production-quality compiler. This could be for a legacy language, such as Coral 66 or Jovial, or for the safety-critical subset of Ada 95 known as SPARK.

If you are interested in participating, please email to nettleton@xgc.com.