It is increasingly necessary for the compiler to overlap successive loop iterations in order to find sufficient instruction-level parallelism to effectively utilize the resources of high-performance processors. Two competing methods have been developed for moving instructions across iteration boundaries: unrolling followed by global acyclic scheduling and software pipelining. This dissertation investigates modulo scheduling, a software pipelining technique. Much of the previous work on modulo scheduling has targeted the relatively well-behaved loops in numeric programs. This dissertation develops new techniques that allow modulo scheduling to be effectively applied to control-intensive non-numeric programs. These techniques overcome the restrictions imposed by problematic control flow and loop exits. This dissertation also demonstrates that unrolling-based optimization prior to scheduling improves the performance of modulo scheduled loops and is, in fact, necessary to allow modulo scheduling to surpass the performance of acyclic scheduling for control-intensive general-purpose programs. Modulo scheduling has the following advantages over the acyclic scheduling approach for control-intensive general-purpose programs. First, modulo scheduling increases performance by maintaining the overlap of loop iterations throughout the execution of the loop. Second, modulo scheduling reduces register pressure by initiating iterations at a consistent rate that is sustainable for the given resources and dependence structure. Third, with the appropriate architectural support, modulo scheduling results in less code expansion because unrolling is required only for optimization, but not to amortize the loss of overlap across the back edge.