Progressive Raising in Multi-level IR

Multi-level intermediate representation (IR) rewriting promises to lower the cost of designing domain-specific compilers by providing a non-opinionated IR, thus enabling to model the right abstraction level for the problem at hand. High-level abstractions are then lowered to low-level IR using progressive lowering (i.e., from higher-level representations down to the lowest in small steps across the abstraction levels). But progressive lowering works in a single direction: high-level operations can be transformed into operations with lower-level of abstraction, but low-level operations are never raised to high-level ones. Thus, the entry point into the lowering pipeline defines the highest level of abstraction for all subsequent transformations, potentially limiting the set of applicable optimizations. This is especially true for general-purpose languages that are not semantically rich enough to enter the higher parts of the lowering pipeline precluding aggressive domain-specific optimizations. To enable effective domain-specific compilation via progressive lowering in a multi-level IR compiler, we propose Multi-Level Tactics. Multi-Level Tactics allows us to describe computational patterns and raise them to high-level abstractions declaratively. It enables a complementary path to progressive lowering, which we call progressive raising, hence extending the set of optimizations that can be performed on general-purpose languages in a multi-level IR compiler.

• Software Systems