References: EE380 Assembly Languages (Chapter 2, 2nd Ed. Chapter 3)

The book overviews things pretty well, but you need some additional details on the MIPS architecture, and a secondary reference for the other stuff wouldn't hurt....

• The "generic" translation of various high-level language constructs into assmbly language is discussed in detail in the course notes I wrote years ago for the undergraduate compilers course at Purdue. The complete notes are available as .ps and .pdf; only the chapter about "compilation goals" is really relevant.
• SPIM (the MIPS simulator) is primarily distributed from the University of Wisconsin SPIM FTP site. However, here we have local copies of what you will most likely need. Note that we created the PDF files from the PS files as a convenience to you; they are not at the SPIM FTP site. There is also a small example program posted here.
  • New for Fall 2002 EE380! a WWW CGI-interface version of SPIM is now available. I wrote the interface, but the simulator is essentially an unmodified copy of spim 6.3.
  • UNIX version (source code) as 6.3 .tar.gz or 6.3 .tar
    (the previous version is 6.2 .tar)
  • UNIX documentation as .pdf and .ps
  • Windows version as an .exe
  • Windows documentation as .pdf and .ps
    also read the unix documentation above because this windows documentation does not discuss the MIPS instruction set
  • DOS version as a .exe
• I've put together mucky (MIPS uCompiler from KY) (also available as C source code using the CGIC library for its CGI interface). This compiler will allow you to see what a very dumb compiler might do with code written in a simple C subset. The C subset uses ANSI C notation and is quite small, allowing only char, short, and int variables and single-dimension arrays of them. The output code should work directly as input to spim (described above) and includes C-callable wrappers for print_string(), print_int(), and exit() OS calls.