In previous work, we presented a low-level typed intermediate language, Typed Assembly Language (TAL), and proved its type system is sound. TAL is sufficiently expressive to support compilation from high-level languages such as ML while preserving source level abstractions. Furthermore, its type system does not impede the use of traditional low-level optimizations.
The compiler presented was based on a continuation-passing style transform, which eliminated the need for a control stack by heap allocating stack frames. However, modern architectures and most compilers are based on stack allocation of these frames. This paper presents STAL, an extension of TAL with stack constructs and stack types to support the stack allocation style. We show that STAL is sufficiently expressive to support languages such as Java, Pascal, and ML; constructs such as exceptions and displays; and optimizations such as tail call elimination and callee-saves registers.
This paper makes two additional contributions. First, it clarifies the connection between compilation based on a CPS transform and stack-based compilation. The latter is seen as a continuation-passing style where continuation closures are unboxed by the caller and the continuation's environment is placed on the stack. Second, it illustrates how STAL can formally model calling conventions by specifying them as formal translations of source function types to STAL types.
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