FID3006 Compilers and Execution Environments 7.5 credits

The course is divided into three modules and includes lectures, individual assignments (both theoretical and practical programming assignments), seminars, and an individual project.

The course covers technologies for implementation of programming languages by means of compilers, both for real and virtual execution environments, technologies to read, understand, translate, improve as well as execute programs:

• To read programs: lexical analysis and syntax analysis. Finite state machines, regular expression context free grammars, LL and LR-parsing.
• To understand programs: semantic analysis, type checking.
• To translate programs: machines and instructions.
• Intermediary code, choice of instructions, conventions for procedure calls.
• To improve programs: machine independent optimisations; computer-oriented optimisations (register allocation, scheduling of instructions).
• To execute programs: virtual execution environments and runtime systems. Memory management, garbage collection, to load and link programs, just-in-time compilation.
• To apply and reason about research  within the area of compilers and programming languages: to conduct a smaller individual project where current research articles within the area are used, where the project can (but does not have to) be related to the doctoral student’s own research.

After passing the course, the doctoral student shall be able to

• design and implement programs with lexical, syntactic, and semantic analysis
• construct program code for the generation of machine code for non-trivial high-level programs
• test, evaluate, and implement methods for optimizing programs
• apply and reason about current research within the area

Knowledge in basic computer engineering/architecture, algorithms, and data structures. Very good programming experience in one or more high-level languages.

 Information on course literature is given in the course memo.

If the course is discontinued, students may request to be examined during the following two academic years.

• EXA1 - Examination, 7.5 credits, grading scale: P, F

Based on recommendation from KTH’s coordinator for disabilities, the examiner will decide how to adapt an examination for students with documented disability.

The examiner may apply another examination format when re-examining individual students.

The course is examined using hand-in assignments, seminars, peer reviewing tasks, and a final project assignment.

The doctoral student receives a pass grade (P) on the FID3006 course if they complete the examination (passing criteria is given in the course memo of FID3006) as well as finish and present (orally and in writing) a smaller individual project at the end of the course.

David Broman

• All members of a group are responsible for the group's work.
• In any assessment, every student shall honestly disclose any help received and sources used.
• In an oral assessment, every student shall be able to present and answer questions about the entire assignment and solution.

This course follows the same structure as the Master’s level course ID2202, but where the doctoral level course also includes a research related project assignment and has higher requirements for passing the course modules (the details are specified in the course memo for FID3006).