GCC Summit

I gave two talks on Go at the GCC Summit last week. The first was about the gccgo frontend: the IR and the gcc interface; for that one I wrote a paper, which is mostly just a miscellany. The second was a Go tutorial, focusing on the more unusual aspects of the language. The one paper and the two slide presentations can be found on the gcc wiki.

My personal favorite presentation at the Summit was by John Regehr of the University of Utah. He spoke about using random input files to test compilers. This is a standard security technique; the interesting aspect to his work was the effort to generate programs which were well-defined, thus permitting his group to test the optimizers. They were able to generate an astonishing number of compiler crashes and miscompilations in every compiler they tested.