Although retargetability has been a major design concern for many compilers, retargetability is a vitally important issue for Digital Signal Processors(DSPs) because the architectural variations of DSPs are much wider than those of General-Purpose Processors(GPPs). This paper reports a preliminary study on a retargetable code generator, called the Very Portable Optimizer(VPO), that has been recently engineered to target DSPs. The compiler was originally implemented to target among GPPs, but thanks to its novel intermediate representation designed to support retargetability, it has been successfully retargeted at a commercial DSP within a relatively short period of time. This retargetable compiler study is at its early stage, so the code quality is still amenable to further improvement. However, the recent improvement on VPO made it possible to achieve quite encouraging results when being compared with a production-quality, highly-customized, compiler.
