期刊名称：Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering
出版年度：2014
卷号：37
期号：1
出版社：IEEE Computer Society
摘要：It has been said that all problems in computer science can be solved by adding another level of indirec- tion, except for performance problems, which are solved by removing levels of indirection. Compilers are our tools for removing levels of indirection automatically. However, we do not trust them when it comes to systems building. Most performance-critical systems are built in low-level programming languages such as C. Some of the downsides of this compared to using modern high-level programming languages are very well known: bugs, poor programmer productivity, a talent bottleneck, and cruelty to program- ming language researchers. In the future we might even add suboptimal performance to this list. In this article, I argue that compilers can be competitive with and outperform human experts at low-level database systems programming. Performance-critical database systems are a limited-enough domain for us to encode systems programming skills as compiler optimizations. However, mainstream compil- ers cannot do this: We need to work on optimizing compilers specialized for the systems programming domain. Recent progress makes their creation eminently feasible
