The State of the Art in Code Generation

Abstract

Some of the requirements for the Genesys approach presented in Sect. 1.1 are a direct result of examining and evaluating the work that has been done in the field of code generation so far. This chapter provides an overview of the current state of the art in code generation for MD*. It starts off with a brief retrospect on classical compiler construction (Sect. 2.1), which developed ideas and concepts that clearly influence current code generation techniques. Sect. 2.2 elaborates on the conceptual foundations of MD* and on how the associated terminology is used in this book. Afterwards, Sect. 2.3 examines the role of code generation in several existing MD* (and related) approaches, and Sect. 2.4 introduces techniques for actually realizing code generators. Sect. 2.5 presents the state of the art in verifying and validating code generators. Finally, Sect. 2.6 compares Genesys with the approaches and techniques described in the preceding sections.