Applications of Computing in Industry : Lecture

Jump Threading is an optimisation which aims to reduce the number of conditional branches performed in a program by forming paths along which these branches are statically resolvable. One case where this proves useful is removing fundamentally unpredictable switch statements.

In this talk, we will use the Jump Threading optimisation as a case study for open-source compiler engineering. We will describe the need for the optimisation on modern processor designs, the principles behind the optimisation, the benefits it brings to code generation, and the difficulties faced implementing Jump Threading in GCC.

James Greenhalgh joined ARM in September 2012 having graduated from the Department of Computing.s MEng Computing course in Summer 2012. At ARM, James works on the GNU Toolchain as part of the Development Solutions Group. Principally, this involves development work on the AArch64 and ARM ports of the GCC compiler.