Projects

This course includes four extensive lab projects.

• • These projects are designed to minimize boilerplate programming, and focus on understanding conceptually difficult problems at a deep level.

  • You must use C or C++ for your projects, with the exception of Project 3.

  • These projects must be completed individually. You can discuss the algorithmic aspects of the projects with your fellow students, but code must be written alone.

    • As a heuristic, if you are working on paper or a whiteboard, you are good. If you are looking at code, you are not.

  • Some projects will have an associated lab report.

  • Start early and pace yourself. Many programming tasks are more difficult to complete in a single stretch than over days or weeks. Some of these projects are impossible to complete in a single stretch. Expect to spend significant time analyzing the problem throughout the implementation.

  • Some projects will contain a checkpoint, where you are expected to have working code for a simplified version of the problem. These checkpoints count towards the project grade.

Project 0: Writing a C++ program

In this project, you will write a C++ program, calesco, that has a main file, code in a separate file with both a header and body file, and a Makefile that compiles the program. What the program does is irrelevant, as long as it meets the functional and structural specifications.

• • GitHub Classroom Link

Project 1: Lexing and Parsing ILOC code.

In this project, you will construct an lexer and parser for a subset of the ILOC assembly language. You will take as input an ILOC file, and print either the stream of tokens, an intermediate representation, or ILOC code. A significant part of the project is the hand-written, character by character, lexer.

• • GitHub Classroom Link

Project 2: Register Allocation for Straight Line Code

In this project, you will construct an allocator that takes a block of ILOC code that uses an unbounded number of registers, and returns an equivalent block of code that uses only a fixed number of registers.

• • GitHub Classroom Link

Project 3: An LL(1) Parser Generator

In this project, you will construct an LL(1) parser generator that will take a language specification, and returns both human-readable information, and LL(1) tables suitable for parsing.

• • GitHub Classroom Link

Project 4: Instruction Scheduling

In this project, you will construct an instruction scheduler for straight-line code, targeting a virtual machine with heterogeneous functional units.

• • GitHub Classroom Link