Two for the price of one: composing partial evaluation and compilation

  • Authors:

  • Michael Sperber;Peter Thiemann

  • Affiliations:

  • Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut für Informatik, Universität Tübingen, Sand 13, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany;Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut für Informatik, Universität Tübingen, Sand 13, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1997 conference on Programming language design and implementation
  • Year:
  • 1997

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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.