`C(ID:3610/c::008)

pronounced "Tick-C"

An extension of ANSI C that supports dynamic code generation
Related languages
C => `C   Extension of
`C => tcc   Compiled by
References:
  • Engler, D.; Hsieh, W. and M. Kaashoek, "`C: A language for high-level efficient, and machine-independent dynamic code generation" pp131-144 view details External link: cite seer Abstract: Dynamic code generation allows specialized code sequences to be created using runtime information. Since this information is by definition not available statically, the use of dynamic code generation can achieve performance inherently beyond that of static code generation. Previous attempts to support dynamic code generation have been low-level, expensive, or machine dependent.

    Despite the growing use of dynamic code generation, no mainstream language provides flexible, portable, and efficient support for it.
    We describe `C (Tick C), a superset of ANSI C that allows flexible, high-level, efficient, and machine-independent specification
    of dynamically generated code. `C provides many of the performance benefits of pure partial evaluation, but in the context of a complex, statically typed, but widely used language.

    `C examples illustrate the ease of specifying dynamically generated code and how it can be put to use.  
          in [ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN] Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, ACM, Jan. 1986. view details
  • Dawson Engler "A `C Tutorial" view details External link: Cite seer
          in [ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN] Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, ACM, Jan. 1986. view details
  • Yuen, C. K. and M. D. Feng "Active objects as atomic control structures in BaLinda K" view details External link: Cite seer Abstract: This paper makes the following contributions:
    ---It describes the `C language, and motivates the design of the
    language.
    ---It describes tcc, with special emphasis on its two runtime
    systems, one tuned for code quality and the other for fast dynamic code generation.
    ---It presents an extensive set of `C examples, which illustrate the
    utility of dynamic code generation and the ease of use of `C in a variety of contexts.
    ---It analyzes the performance of tcc and tcc-generated dynamic code
    on several benchmarks. Measurements show that use of dynamic compilation can improve performance by almost an order of magnitude in some cases, and generally results in two- to four-fold speedups. The overhead of dynamic compilation is usually recovered in under 100 uses of the dynamic code; sometimes it can be recovered within one use.

    The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents
    `C. Section 3 describes tcc. Section 4 illustrates some sample applications of `C. Performance measurements appear in Section 5.
    We discuss related work in Section 6, and summarize our conclusions in Section 7.

    Appendix A describes the syntactic differences between `C and ANSI C.
          in Computer Languages 24(4) view details