DoI: 10.1145/1461928.1461946
current status, and future directions of compiler technology and make four main recommendations in support of a vibrant compiler field in the years to come. These recommendations were drawn from discussions among presenters and attendees at a U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored Workshop on Future Directions for Compiler Research and Education in 2007. As 2007 was the 50th anniversary of IBM’s release of the first optimizing compiler, it was a particularly appropriate year to take stock of the status of compiler technology and discuss its future over the next 50 years. Today, compilers and high-level languages are the foundation of the complex and ubiquitous software infrastructure that undergirds the global economy. The powerful and elegant technology in compilers has also been invaluable in other domains (such as hardware synthesis). It is no
exaggeration to say that compilers and high-level languages are as central to the information age as semiconductor technology.
In the coming decade, 2010 to 2020, compiler research will play a critical role in addressing two of the major challenges facing the overall computer field:
Cost of programming multicore processors. While machine power will continue to grow impressively, increased parallelism, rather than clock rate, will be the driving force in computing in the foreseeable future. This ongoing shift toward parallel architectural paradigms is one of the greatest challenges for the microprocessor and software industries. In 2005, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel Corporation, said, “We are at the cusp of a transition to multicore, multithreaded architectures, and we still have not demonstrated the ease of programming the move will require…” 3
Security and reliability of complex software systems. Software systems are increasingly complex, making the need to address defects and security attacks more urgent. The profound economic impact of program defects was discussed in a 2002 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), concluding that program defects “are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually, or about 0.6% of the gross domestic product.” The 2005 U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) report Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization included secure software engineering and software assurance among its top 10 research priorities, concluding with: “Commonly used software engineering practices permit dangerous errors, such as improper handling of buffer overflows, which enable hundreds of attack programs to compromise millions of computers every year. In the future, the Nation [the U.S.] may face even more challenging problems as adversaries—both foreign and do-
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