Parallel Attribute Grammar Evaluation

This paper reports on experiments with parallel compila tion of programming languages In order to take advantage of the potential parallelism we express the language trans lation process as an attribute grammar evaluation problem We see three primary bene ts to using attribute grammars First since attribute grammars provide a functional speci cation of the language translation process they are easily amenable to parallel implementation with relatively little synchronization overhead Second as a high level speci cation of the language they allow parallel translators to be produced automatically relieving the compiler writer from the burden of dealing with parallelism Third they provide a basis for a wide variety of language translation problems ranging from traditional programming language compila tion to more ambitious problems such as proof checking text formatting etc We study the e ciency and the potential for parallelism of various attribute grammar evaluation methods and we present the design of a combined evaluator which seeks to combine the potential for concurrency of dynamic eval uators and the sequential e ciency of static evaluators We have used our methods to generate a parallel compiler for a large Pascal subset Measurements on a network multiprocessor consisting of up to SUN workstations connected by an Ethernet network indicate that the par allel compiler outperforms its sequential counterpart by a factor of up to with sequential compilation times and quality of produced code comparable to commonly avail able compilers