Register Promotion in C Programs

Abstract

The combination of pointers and pointer arithmetic in C makes the task of improving C programs somewhat more difficult than improving programs written in simpler languages like Fortran. While much work has been published that focuses on the analysis of pointers, little has appeared that uses the results of such analysis to improve the code compiled for C. This paper examines the problem of register promotion in C and presents experimental results showing that it can have dramatic effects on memory traffic.