A simple tree pattern matching algorithm for code generator

This paper describes a simple tree pattern matching algorithm for the code generator of compilers. The intermediate code (Register Transfer Language) is matched with the tree-rewriting rules of the instruction description which describes the target architecture to generate the assembly code. The hashing function is used in our system to transform a tree pattern matching problem into a simple number comparison. Compared with GNU C compiler (gcc), the tree pattern matching time can be reduced by 69% and the compiler time by 6%, and the space of the instruction descriptions can be reduced by 4.10 times on DLX and 2.14 on SPARC. The size of table, which is necessary for the code generator, is quite small in our method.