Section: Software

Gecos

Participants : Steven Derrien [correspondant] , Daniel Ménard, Kevin Martin, Antoine Floch, Antoine Morvan, Adeel Pasha, Patrice Quinton, Amit Kumar, Loïc Cloatre.

The Gecos (Generic Compiler Suite) project is an open source Eclipse-based C compiler infrastructure developed in the Cairn group since 2004 that allows for fast prototyping of complex compiler passes. Gecos was designed so as to address part of the shortcomings of existing C/C++ infrastructures such as SUIF and LLVM.

Gecos is a 100% Java based implementation and is based on modern software engineering practices. It uses Eclipse plugin as an underlying infrastructure and thus takes benefits of its plugin mechanism to be easily extensible. So as to benefit from all the benefits of Model Driven Software Engineering techniques, we now also offer a EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) based version of the compiler intermediate representation, and plan to base all subsequent developments on MDE technologies.

The Gecos infrastructure is still under very active development, and now serves as a backbone infrastructure to many group members (Upak, Durase, ID.Fix). In 2009, the work has focused on retargeting the infrastructure for source to source transformation, in the context of the Nano2012-S2S4HLS project in collaboration with STMicroelectronics. The Gecos compiler framework is open-source and is hosted on the INRIA gforge http://gecos.gforge.inria.fr .