The last years have witnessed a flurry of new results in the area of partial evaluation. These tutorial notes survey the field and present a critical assessment of the state of the art. 1 Introduction Partial evaluation is a source-to-source program transformation technique for specializing programs with respect to parts of their input. In essence, partial evaluation removes layers of interpretation. In the most general sense, an interpreter can be defined as a program whose control flow is determined by its input data. As Abelson points out, [43, Foreword], even programs that are not themselves interpreters have important interpreter-like pieces. These pieces contain both compile-time and run-time constructs. Partial evaluation identifies and eliminates the compile-time constructs. 1.1 A complete example We consider a function producing formatted text. Such functions exist in most programming languages (e.g., format in Lisp and printf in C). Figure 1 displays a formatting functio...

Partial evaluation provides a unifying paradigm for a broad spectrum of work in

This paper gives a gentle introduction to Turchin's supercompilation and its applications in metacomputation with an emphasis on recent developments. First, a complete supercompiler, including positive driving and generalization, is defined for a functional language and illustrated with examples. Then a taxonomy of related transformers is given and compared to the supercompiler. Finally, we put supercompilation into the larger perspective of metacomputation and consider three metacomputation tasks: specialization, composition, and inversion.

Profile­-driven optimizations and dynamic optimization through specialization have taken optimizations to a new level. By using actual run­time data, optimizers can generate code that is specially tuned for the task at hand. However, most existing compilers that perform these optimizations require separate test runs to gather profile information, and/or user annotations in the code. In this thesis, I describe run­time optimizations that a dynamic compiler can perform automatically --- without user annotations --- by utilizing real­time performance data. I describe the implementation of the dynamic optimizations in the framework of a Java Virtual Machine and give performance results.

The aim of this work is the development and application of a partial evaluation procedure for rewriting-based functional logic programs. Functional logic programming languages unite the two main declarative programming paradigms. The rewriting-based computational model extends traditional functional programming languages by incorporating logical features, including logical variables and built-in search, into its framework. This work is the first to address the automatic specialisation of these functional logic programs. In particular, a theoretical framework for the partial evaluation of rewriting-based functional logic programs is defined and its correctness is established. Then, an algorithm is formalised which incorporates the theoretical framework for the procedure in a fully automatic technique. Constraint solving is used to represent additional information about the terms encountered during the transformation in order to improve the efficiency and size of the residual programs. ...

Partial evaluation has been known for some time to be very effective when applied to software; in this paper we demonstrate that it can also be usefully applied to hardware. We present a bit-level algorithm that supports the partial evaluation of synchronous digital circuits. Full PE of combinational logic is noted to be equivalent to Boolean minimisation. A loop unrolling technique, supporting both partial and full unrolling, is described. Experimental results are given, showing that partial evaluation of a simple microprocessor against a ROM image is equivalent to compiling the ROM program directly into low level hardware. 1.

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This thesis describes a compiler for the asynchronous real-time programming language ALDiSP. Though the language has a complex semantics not suited for easy compilation, the compiler has to generate code for target platforms that have stringent space limitations, and for target applications that have to satisfy hard real-time requirements. To accomplish this feat, the compiler is based upon an abstract interpreter that simulates all possible evaluation paths of the program. In a reconstruction phase, the program is then totally re-created from the information gained during this simulation. The abstract interpreter is an extension of the formal semantics of ALDiSP.