The SUIF compiler is part of the National Compiler Infrastructure (NCI), along with Zephyr, whose design began almost a decade ago. The infrastructure was intended as a general compiler framework for multiple languages. It is written in C++, like Polaris, and the currently available version supports analysis of C programs. SUIF 1 is a parallelizing compiler and SUIF 2 performs interprocedural analysis.

Both SUIF and Cetus fall into the category of extensible source-to-source compilers, so at first SUIF looked like the natural choice for our infrastructure. Three main reasons eliminated our pursuit of this option. The first was the perception that the project is no longer active - the last major release was in 2001 and does not appear to have been updated recently. The second reason was, although SUIF intends to support multiple languages, we could not find complete front ends other than for C and an old version of Java. Work began on front ends for Fortran and C++, but they are not available in the current release. Hence, as is, SUIF essentially supports a single language, C. Finally, we had a strong preference for using Java as the compiler implementation language. Java offers several features conducive to good software engineering. It provides good debugging support, high portability, garbage collection (contributing to the ease of writing passes), and its own automatic documentation system. These facts prompted us to pursue other compiler infrastructures.