An adaptive computation maintains the relationship between its input and output as the input changes. Although various techniques for adaptive computing have been proposed, they remain limited in their scope of applicability. We propose a general mechanism for adaptive computing that enables one to make any purely-functional program adaptive. We show

We present a framework for applying memoization selectively. The framework provides programmer control over equality, space usage, and identification of precise dependences so that memoization can be applied according to the needs of an application. Two key properties of the framework are that it is efficient and yields programs whose performance can be analyzed using standard techniques. We describe the framework in the context of a functional language and an implementation as an SML library. The language is based on a modal type system and allows the programmer to express programs that reveal their true data dependences when executed. The SML implementation cannot support this modal type system statically, but instead employs run-time checks to ensure correct usage of primitives.

Self-adjusting computation uses a combination of dynamic dependence graphs and memoization to efficiently update the output of a program as the input changes incrementally or dynamically over time. Related work showed various theoretical results, indicating that the approach can be effective for a reasonably broad range of applications. In this article, we describe algorithms and implementation techniques to realize self-adjusting computation and present an experimental evaluation of the proposed approach on a variety of applications, ranging from simple list primitives to more sophisticated computational geometry algorithms. The results of the experiments show that the approach is effective in practice, often offering orders of magnitude speedup from recomputing the output from scratch. We believe this is the first experimental evidence that incremental computation of any type is effective in practice for a reasonably broad set of applications.

From the algorithmic perspective, we describe novel data structures for tracking the dependences ina computation and a change-propagation algorithm for adjusting computations to changes. We show that the overhead of our dependence tracking techniques is O(1). To determine the effectiveness of changepropagation, we present an analysis technique, called trace stability, and apply it to a number of applications.

Self-adjusting computation enables writing programs that can automatically and efficiently respond to changes to their data (e.g., inputs). The idea behind the approach is to store all data that can change over time in modifiable references and to let computations construct traces that can drive change propagation. After changes have occurred, change propagation updates the result of the computation by re-evaluating only those expressions that depend on the changed data. Previous approaches to selfadjusting computation require that modifiable references be written at most once during execution—this makes the model applicable only in a purely functional setting. In this paper, we present techniques for imperative self-adjusting computation where modifiable references can be written multiple times. We define a language SAIL (Self-Adjusting Imperative Language) and prove consistency, i.e., that change propagation and from-scratch execution are observationally equivalent. Since SAIL programs are imperative, they can create cyclic data structures. To prove equivalence in the presence of cycles in the store, we formulate and use an untyped, step-indexed logical relation, where step indices are used to ensure well-foundedness. We show that SAIL accepts an asymptotically efficient implementation by presenting algorithms and data structures for its implementation. When the number of operations (reads and writes) per modifiable is bounded by a constant, we show that change propagation becomes as efficient as in the non-imperative case. The general case incurs a slowdown that is logarithmic in the maximum number of such operations. We describe a prototype implementation of SAIL as a Standard ML library. 1

Abstract. This paper presents a semantics of self-adjusting computation and proves that the semantics is correct and consistent. The semantics integrates change propagation with the classic idea of memoization to enable reuse of computations under mutation to memory. During evaluation, reuse of a computation via memoization triggers a change propagation that adjusts the reused computation to reflect the mutated memory. Since the semantics combines memoization and change-propagation, it involves both non-determinism and mutation. Our consistency theorem states that the non-determinism is not harmful: any two evaluations of the same program starting at the same state yield the same result. Our correctness theorem states that mutation is not harmful: self-adjusting programs are consistent with purely functional programming. We formalized the semantics and its meta-theory in the LF logical framework and machine-checked the proofs in Twelf. 1

Self-adjusting computation provides an evaluation model where computations can respond automatically to modifications to their data by using a mechanism for propagating modifications through the computation. Current approaches to self-adjusting computation guarantee correctness by recording dependencies in a trace at the granularity of individual memory operations. Tracing at the granularity of memory operations, however, has some limitations: it can be asymptotically inefficient (e.g., compared to optimal solutions) because it cannot take advantage of problem-specific structure, it requires keeping a large computation trace (often proportional to the runtime of the program on the current input), and it introduces moderately large constant factors in practice. In this paper, we extend dependence-tracing to work at the granularity of the query and update operations of arbitrary (abstract)

Abstract. In self-adjusting computation, programs respond automatically and efficiently to modifications to their data by tracking the dynamic data dependences of the computation and incrementally updating the output as needed. In this tutorial, we describe the self-adjustingcomputation model and present the language ∆ML (Delta ML) for writing self-adjusting programs. 1