Can formal specification techniques be scaled-up to industrial problems such as the development of domain-specific languages and the renovation of large COBOL systems? We have developed a compiler for the specification formalism ASF+SDF that has been used successfully to meet such industrial challenges. This result is achieved in two ways: the compiler performs a variety of optimizations and generates efficient C code, and the compiled code uses a run-time memory management system based on maximal subterm sharing and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. We present an overview of these techniques and evaluate their effectiveness in several benchmarks. It turns out that execution speed of compiled ASF+SDF specifications is at least as good as that of comparable systems, while memory usage is in many cases an order of magnitude smaller.

Over 25 implementations of different functional languages are benchmarked using the same program, a floatingpoint intensive application taken from molecular biology. The principal aspects studied are compile time and 1 Dept. of Computer Systems, Univ. of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands, e-mail: pieter@fwi.uva.nl 2 D'epart. d'informatique et r.o., Univ. de Montr'eal, succursale centre-ville, Montr'eal H3C 3J7, Canada, e-mail: feeley@iro.umontreal.ca 3 Informatik, Universitat des Saarlandes, 66041 Saarbrucken 11, Germany, e-mail: alt@cs.uni-sb.de 4 Dept. of Computer Systems, Chalmers Univ. of Technology, 412 96 Goteborg, Sweden, e-mail: augustss@cs.chalmers.se 5 Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Zurich, Winterthurerstr. 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland, e-mail: baumann@ifi.unizh.ch 6 Dept. of Computer Systems, Univ. of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands, e-mail: beemster@fwi.uva.nl 7 LIENS, URA 1327 du CNRS, ' Ecole Normale Sup'erieur...