Code Composition as an Implementation Language for Compilers

Code composition is an effective technique for a compiler to implement complex high-level operations. The developer (i.e., the language designer or compiler writer) provides building blocks consisting of sequences of code written in, e.g., C, that are combined by a composition system to generate the code for such a high-level operation. The composition system can include optimizations not commonly found in compilers; e.g., it can specialize the code sequences based on loop nesting depth or procedure parameters. We describe a composition system, Catacomb, and illustrate its use for mapping array operations onto a parallel system.