MieruCompiler: integrated visualization tool with "horizontal slicing" for educational compilers

This paper proposes a novel visualization tool for educational compilers, called MieruCompiler. Educational compilers that generate native assembly code like i386 have many practical and pedagogical advantages, but they also have a disadvantage that the undergraduate students need to acquire a wide range of knowledge on native machine instructions, assembly directives, application binary interface (ABI), so on. To reduce this learning cost, MieruCompiler provides various visualizations as a rich internet application (RIA) including: (1) highlighting all related slices (called "horizontal slicing" after [13], but not implemented in [13]) among the source code, abstract syntax tree, assembly code, symbol table, stack layout and compiler code, when the user hovers the mouse pointer over a piece of them, (2) displaying tooltips for machine instructions, assembly directives, etc., and (3) visualizing stack layouts which are very likely to be implicit. As a preliminary evaluation, MieruCompiler was used in two universities, which produced promising results.

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