Online-and-offline partial evaluation (extended abstract): a mixed approach

  • Authors:

  • Eijiro Sumii;Naoki Kobayashi

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Tokyo;University of Tokyo

  • Venue:
  • PEPM '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid method of partial evaluation (PE), which combines the power of online PE and the efficiency of offline PE, for a typed strict functional language. We begin with a naive online partial evaluator, and make it efficient without sacrificing its power. To this end, we (1) use state (instead of continuation) for let-insertion, (2) take a so-called cogen approach, and (3) decrease unnecessary computations—such as unnecessary let-insertions and unused values/expressions—with a type-based use analysis, which subsumes various monovariant binding-time analyses. Our method yields the same residual programs as the naive online partial evaluator, modulo inlining of redundant let-bindings. We implemented and compared our method and existing methods, both online and offline. Experiments show that our method is at least twice as fast as any other method (e.g., more than 7 times as fast as Thiemann's cogen approach to offline PE in the specialization of the power function, thanks to the reduction of unnecessary let-insertions) when they yield equivalent residual programs.