Survey of code-size reduction methods
- 1 September 2003
- journal article
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM Computing Surveys
- Vol. 35 (3), 223-267
- https://doi.org/10.1145/937503.937504
Abstract
Program code compression is an emerging research activity that is having an impact in several production areas such as networking and embedded systems. This is because the reduced-sized code can have a positive impact on network traffic and embedded system costs such as memory requirements and power consumption. Although code-size reduction is a relatively new research area, numerous publications already exist on it. The methods published usually have different motivations and a variety of application contexts. They may use different principles and their publications often use diverse notations. To our knowledge, there are no publications that present a good overview of this broad range of methods and give a useful assessment. This article surveys twelve methods and several related works appearing in some 50 papers published up to now. We provide extensive assessment criteria for evaluating the methods and offer a basis for comparison. We conclude that it is fairly hard to make any fair comparisons of the methods or draw conclusions about their applicability.Keywords
This publication has 23 references indexed in Scilit:
- Expression-tree-based algorithms for code compression on embedded RISC architecturesIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 2000
- Compiler techniques for code compactionACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 2000
- A code compression system based on pipelined interpretersSoftware: Practice and Experience, 1999
- Automatic inference of models for statistical code compressionACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1999
- Enhanced code compression for embedded RISC processorsACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1999
- Selective instruction compression for memory energy reduction in embedded systemsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1999
- Slim binariesCommunications of the ACM, 1997
- Code compressionPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1997
- A locally adaptive data compression schemeCommunications of the ACM, 1986
- Analyzing and compressing assembly codePublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1984