Optimizing programs with intended semantics

Modern object-oriented languages have complex features that cause programmers to overspecify their programs. This overspecification hinders automatic optimizers, since they must preserve the overspecified semantics. If an optimizer knew which semantics the programmer intended, it could do a better job. Making a programmer clarify his intentions by placing assumptions into the program is rarely practical. This is because the programmer does not know which parts of the programs’ overspecified semantics hinder the optimizer. Therefore, the programmer has to guess which assumption to add. Since the programmer can add many different assumptions to a large program, he will need to place many such assumptions before he guesses right and helps the optimizer. We present IOpt, a practical optimizer that uses a specification of the programmers’ intended semantics to enable additional optimizations. That way, our optimizer can significantly improve the performance of a program. We present...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Daniel von Dincklage, Amer Diwan
• Keywords: Intended Semantics, OOPSLA 2009, Overspecified Semantics, Programmers, Security Privacy