Constructing an optimisation phase using Grammatical Evolution

Optimising compilers present their authors with an intractable design space. A substantial body of work has used heuristic search techniques to search this space for the purposes of adapting optimisers to their environment. To date, most of this work has focused on sequencing, tuning and guiding the actions of atomic hand-written optimisation phases. In this paper we explore the adaption of optimisers at a deeper level by demonstrating that it is feasible to automatically build a non-trivial optimisation phase, for a simple functional language, using grammatical evolution. We show that the individuals evolved compare well in performance to a hand-written optimisation phase on a range of benchmarks. We conclude with proposals of how this work and its applications can be extended.