Program specializers improve the speed of programs by performing some of the programs' reductions at specialization time rather than at runtime. This specialization process can be time-consuming; one common technique for improving the speed of the specialization of a particular program is to specialize the specializer itself on that program, creating a custom specializer, or program generator, for that particular program.

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. ...

interpretation [Abramsky and Hankin 1987; Cousot 1981; Jones and Nielson 1990] has been used to formulate a wide variety of static analyses aimed at optimizing programs in practical programming languages. Research in the area has been focusing on the conceptual and formal aspects of the topic. Special emphasis has been put on such issues as accuracy, termination, and relating non-standard and standard semantic definitions. However, the practical aspects involved in implementing an abstract interpreter have not received as much attention. This situation is even more pronounced for analyses of languages with higher-order functions. A static analysis includes a critical phase that consists of finding a fixpoint to a set of (possibly) recursive abstract functions derived from the analyzed program. To be of any practical use, an analysis should include an efficient and accurate fixpoint algorithm. The efficiency depends mostly on this accuracy. For example, some analyses only determine one ...

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The degree to which a partial evaluator can specialize a source program depends on how accurately the partial evaluator can represent and maintain information about runtime values. Partial evaluators always lose some accuracy due to their use of finite type systems; however, existing partial evaluation techniques lose information about runtime values even when their type systems are capable of representing such information. This paper describes two sources of such loss in existing specializers, solutions for both cases, and the implementation of these solutions in our partial evaluation system, FUSE.

Interpretation and run-time compilation techniques are increasingly important because they can support heterogeneous architectures, evolving programming languages, and dynamically-loaded code. Interpretation is simple to implement, but yields poor performance. Run-time compilation yields better performance, but is costly to implement. One way to preserve simplicity but obtain good performance is to apply program specialization to an interpreter in order to generate an efficient implementation of the program automatically. Such specialization can be carried out at both compile time and run time. Recent advances in program-specialization technology have significantly improved the performance of specialized interpreters. This paper presents and assesses experiments applying program specialization to both bytecode and structured-language interpreters. The results show that for some general-purpose bytecode languages, specialization of an interpreter can yield speedups of up to a factor ...

A binding-time analysis is the first pass of an offline partial evaluator. It determines which parts of a program may be executed at specialization time. Region-based binding-time analysis applies to higher-order programming languages with firstclass references. The consideration of effects in the determination of binding time properties makes it possible to have a partial evaluator perform assignments at specialization time. We present such a region-based binding-time analysis and prove its correctness with respect to a continuation-style semantics for an annotated call-by-value lambda calculus with ML-style references. We provide a relative correctness proof that relies on the correctness of region inference and on the correctness of a binding-time analysis for an applied lambda calculus. The main tool in the proof is a translation from terms with explicit region annotations to an extended continuation-passing store-passing style. The analysis is monovariant/monomorphic, however, ess...

Much attention has been given to the call-by-value continuation passing style (CBV CPS) translation as a tool in partial evaluation, but the call-by-name (CBN) CPS translation has not been investigated. We undertake a systematic investigation of the effect of CBN CPS in connection with partial evaluation and deforestation. First, we give an example where CBN CPS translation acts as a binding time improvement to achieve the effects of deforestation using partial evaluation. The same effect cannot be achieved with CBV CPS. Second, we prove formally that the CBN CPS translation together with partial evaluation has the power to achieve all the effects of deforestation. The consequence of these results is a practical tool (the CBN CPS) for improving the results of partial evaluation, as well as an improved understanding of the relation between partial evaluation and deforestation.

: Interpretation and run-time compilation techniques are becoming increasingly important due to the need to support heterogeneous architectures, evolving programming languages, and dynamically downloaded code. Although interpreters are easy to write and maintain, they are inefficient. On the other hand, run-time compilation provides efficient execution, but is costly to implement. One way to get the best of both approaches is to apply program specialization to an interpreter in order to generate an efficient implementation automatically. Recent advances in program specialization technology have resulted in important improvements in the performance of specialized interpreters. This paper presents and assesses experimental results for the application of program specialization to both bytecode and structured-language interpreters. The results show that for general-purpose bytecode, program specialization can yield speedups of up to a factor of four, while specializing certain structured-l...

We present a novel technique for offine partial evaluation of functional languages with an ML-style typing discipline. Our program specialization method comprises a polymorphic binding-time analysis with polymorphic recursion. Based on the region calculus of Tofte and Talpin, we develop a binding-time analysis as a constraint analysis on top of region inference. Our insight is to regard binding times as properties of regions.