Update: A poster about this project was accepted to Euro LLVM. Come and say hi if you’re going!

Anyone who has ever had to write code in Matlab, scipy, R or any other scientific computing framework/language will realise that Julia is a Good Idea: an open, properly designed programming language for science. I’ve played around with Julia a couple of times so I was very excited when I got the chance to work on a Julia related project for the Modern Compiler Design course here in the Computer Lab.

The result turned out quite interesting, I use the LLVM polyhedral optimisation framework polly to hoist the array bounds checks that Julia generates for all array accesses out of loop nests. This brings a speed up in itself but the true advantage it brings is that it makes futher optimisations of the loop nest possible.