Section: Software

Gecos

Participants : Steven Derrien [correspondant] , Daniel Menard, Kevin Martin, Maxime Naullet, Antoine Floch, Antoine Morvan, Clément Guy, Amit Kumar.

The Gecos (Generic Compiler Suite) project is an open source Eclipse-based C compiler infrastructure developed in the Cairn group since 2004 that allows for fast prototyping of complex compiler passes. Gecos was designed so as to address part of the shortcomings of existing C/C++ infrastructures such as SUIF and LLVM.

Gecos is a 100% Java based implementation and is based on modern software engineering practices. It uses Eclipse plugin as an underlying infrastructure and thus takes benefits of its plugin mechanism to be easily extensible. Gecos follows Model Driven Software Engineering techniques and rely on Eclipse Modeling Framework. The framework is open-source and is hosted on the INRIA gforge at http://gecos.gforge.inria.fr .

The Gecos infrastructure is still under very active development, and now serves as a backbone infrastructure to many group members (Upak, Durase, ID.Fix). In 2011, the work has focused on extending the loop analysis transformation framework, which now includes an OpenMP static analysis tool (developed jointly with Colorado State University) that was presented in June at the 7th International Workshop on OpenMP [39] . The software engineering challenges posed by optimizing compiler also happen to be a novel and promising application field for the MDE community, which led to joint publication [45] with members from CSU and the Triskell EPI team at the IEEE/ACM Models conference in October 2011. This cross fertilization between MDE and Compilers is the core topic of Clément Guy's PhD thesis supervised by members of CAIRN (S. Derrien) and Triskell (J.M. Jezequel and B. Combemale).