The author of a distributed system is often faced with a dilemma when writing the system’s communication code. If the code is written by hand (e.g., using Active Messages) or partly by hand (e.g., using mpi) then the speed of the application may be maximized, but the human effort required to implement and maintain the system is greatly increased. On the other hand, if the code is generated using a high-level tool (e.g., a corba idl compiler) then programmer efiort will be reduced, but the performance of the application may be intolerably poor. The tradeoff between system performance and development effort arises because existing communication middleware is ineffcient, imposes excessive presentation layer overhead, and therefore fails to expose much of the underlying network performance to application code. Moreover, there is often a mismatch between the desired communication style of the application (e.g., asynchronous message passing) and the communication style of the code produced by an idl compiler (synchronous remote procedure call). We believe that this need not be the case, but that established optimizing compiler technology can be applied and extended to attack these domain-specific problems.