Interactive Compilation Interface


The Interactive Compilation Interface is a plugin system with a high-level compiler-independent and low-level compiler-dependent API to transform current black-box compilers into collaborative modular interactive toolsets. It was developed by Grigori Fursin during MILEPOST project. The ICI framework acts as a "middleware" interface between the compiler and the user-definable plugins. It opens up and reuses the production-quality compiler infrastructure to enable program analysis and instrumentation, fine-grain program optimizations, simple prototyping of new development and research ideas while avoiding building new compilation tools from scratch. For example, it is used in MILEPOST GCC to automate compiler and architecture design and program optimizations based on statistical analysis and machine learning, and predict profitable optimization to improve program execution time, code size and compilation time.

Developments

ICI is now available in mainline GCC since version 4.5