Yes, but you'll have to find a niche where gcc or LLVM don't make sense. Intel has a huge compiler group and insider architectural knowledge, and icc has a minuscule market share. I don't see a viable business targeting mainstream processors.
I was co-founder of a compiler startup that targeted high-performance, cost- and power-sensitive communications processors that were idiosyncratic and hard to program (e.g. split-phase memory accesses, explicit hardware threading and cache control, non-interlocked pipelines, massive SIMD and VLIW parallelism, etc.) Existing compilers for these architectures, if they existed, had abysmal efficiency of generated code.
I'm a little out of touch, but I don't know if this market exists anymore. I think the FPGA tool space is interesting and high-level synthesis tools is one direction to take compiler technology.
The other place compiler development makes sense is inside hardware companies doing new architectural development, e.g., Tilera, Adapteva/Parallella, etc. I ran into Andreas about a year ago and he said they were looking for someone to work on development tools.
You can think of query optimizers and schedulers for distributed computing clusters as the data center evolution of compiler technology in the Barroso, Hölzle warehouse-scale computer sense. I think there's definitely opportunities to innovate in that market. See, for example, the recent post about Baidu accelerating SQL queries with FPGAs:
I was co-founder of a compiler startup that targeted high-performance, cost- and power-sensitive communications processors that were idiosyncratic and hard to program (e.g. split-phase memory accesses, explicit hardware threading and cache control, non-interlocked pipelines, massive SIMD and VLIW parallelism, etc.) Existing compilers for these architectures, if they existed, had abysmal efficiency of generated code.
I'm a little out of touch, but I don't know if this market exists anymore. I think the FPGA tool space is interesting and high-level synthesis tools is one direction to take compiler technology.
The other place compiler development makes sense is inside hardware companies doing new architectural development, e.g., Tilera, Adapteva/Parallella, etc. I ran into Andreas about a year ago and he said they were looking for someone to work on development tools.
You can think of query optimizers and schedulers for distributed computing clusters as the data center evolution of compiler technology in the Barroso, Hölzle warehouse-scale computer sense. I think there's definitely opportunities to innovate in that market. See, for example, the recent post about Baidu accelerating SQL queries with FPGAs:
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/08/24/baidu-takes-fpga-appr...