Eliminating False Phase Interactions to Reduce Optimization Phase Order Search Space

Compiler optimization phase ordering is a longstanding problem, and is of particular relevance to the performance-oriented and cost-constrained domain of embedded systems applications. Optimization phases are known to interact with each other, enabling and disabling opportunities for successive phases. Therefore, varying the order of applying these phases often generates distinct output codes, with different speed, code-size and power consumption characteristics. Most current approaches to address this issue focus on developing innovative methods to selectively evaluate the vast phase order search space to produce a good (but, potentially suboptimal) representation for each program.