Section: Software and Platforms

Gecos

Participants : Steven Derrien [corresponding author] , Nicolas Simon, Maxime Naullet, Antoine Morvan.

Keywords: source-to-source compiler, model-driven software engineering, retargetable compilation.

The Gecos (Generic Compiler Suite) project is a source-to-source compiler infrastructure developed in the Cairn group since 2004. It was designed to enable fast prototyping of program analysis and transformation for hardware synthesis and retargetable compilation domains.

Gecos is 100% Java based and takes advantage of modern model driven software engineering practices. It uses the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) as an underlying infrastructure and takes benefits of its features to make it easily extensible. Gecos 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 serves as a backbone infrastructure to projects of the group. Part of the framework is jointly developed with Colorado State University and since 2012 it is used in the context of the ALMA European project.

Developments in Gecos in 2013 have focused on polyhedral loop transformations and efficient SIMD code generation for fixed point arithmetic data-types as a part of the ALMA project. Significant efforts were also been put to provide a coarse-grain parallelization engine targeting the data-flow actor model in the context of the COMPA ANR project. An article describing the design choice and the main features of the framework was presented at the international workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation in september 2013 [46] .