Incremental computation with names

Over the past thirty years, there has been significant progress in developing general-purpose, language-based approaches to incremental computation, which aims to efficiently update the result of a computation when an input is changed. A key design challenge in such approaches is how to provide efficient incremental support for a broad range of programs. In this paper, we argue that first-class names are a critical linguistic feature for efficient incremental computation. Names identify computations to be reused across differing runs of a program, and making them first class gives programmers a high level of control over reuse. We demonstrate the benefits of names by presenting NOMINAL ADAPTON, an ML-like language for incremental computation with names. We describe how to use NOMINAL ADAPTON to efficiently incrementalize several standard programming patterns—including maps, folds, and unfolds— and show how to build efficient, incremental probabilistic trees and tries. Sin...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Matthew A. Hammer, Joshua Dunfield, Kyle Headley, Nicholas Labich, Jeffrey S. Foster, Michael W. Hicks, David Van Horn
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2015, Security Privacy