As transistors size and power limitations stroke computer industry, hardware parallelism arose as the solution, bringing old forgotten problems back into equation to solve the existing limitations of current parallel technologies. Compilers regain focus by being the most relevant puzzle piece in the quest for the expected computer performance improvements predicted by Moores law no longer possible without parallelism. Parallel research is mainly focused in either the language or architectural aspects, not really giving the needed attention to compiler problems, being the reason for the weak compiler support by many parallel languages or architectures, not allowing to exploit performance to the best. This thesis addresses these problems by presenting: Erbium, a low level streaming data-flow language supporting multiple producer and consumer task communication; a very efficient runtime implementation for x86 architectures also addressing other types of architectures; a compiler integration of the language as an intermediate representation in GCC; a study of the language primitives dependencies, allowing compilers to further optimise the Erbium code not only through specific parallel optimisations but also through traditional compiler optimisations, such as partial redundancy elimination and dead code elimination.
