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.

ALCHEMIST is a general purpose object-oriented transformation generator. ALCHEMIST provides a new approach to developing transformations between any well-defined representations. It allows users to define the syntactic structure of the data representations and the related structure associations with a grammar notation. These grammars can then be augmented with semantic operations. From this description a persistent object-oriented representation is formed and a transformation module is generated automatically. This transformation module relies on an object representation of the parse tree. In this paper the principles underlying ALCHEMIST are discussed and its object-oriented design decisions are described.

We focus on mechanically generating object oriented code for semantic analysis. As an example, we consider scope checking of a compiler of which the source language is Pict and of which the target and implementation language is Java. 1