Two for the Price of One: Composing Partial Evaluation and Compilation

One of the flagship applications of partial evaluation is compilation and compiler generation. However, partial evaluation is usually expressed as a source-to-source transformation for high-level languages, whereas realistic compilers produce object code. We close this gap by composing a partial evaluator with a compiler by automatic means. Our work is a successful application of several meta-computation techniques to build the system, both in theory and in practice. The composition is an application of deforestation or fusion. The result is a run-time code generation system built from existing components. Its applications are numerous. For example, it allows the language designer to perform interpreter-based experiments with a source-to-source version of the partial evaluator before building a realistic compiler which generates object code automatically. Keywords semantics-directed compiler generation, partial evaluation, compilation of higher-order functional languages, run-time co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Michael Sperber, Peter Thiemann
• Keywords: Compiler, Partial Evaluation, Partial Evaluator, PLDI 1997, Programming Languages