Abstract

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.

Citations