Sergey, I; Vytiniotis, D; Jones, SLP; Breitner, J; (2017) Modular, higher order cardinality analysis in theory and practice. Journal of Functional Programming , 27 , Article e11. 10.1017/S0956796817000016.

Preview

Text Sergey_Modular_ higher_order.pdf - Accepted Version Download (424kB) | Preview

Abstract

Since the mid '80s, compiler writers for functional languages (especially lazy ones) have been writing papers about identifying and exploiting thunks and lambdas that are used only once. However, it has proved difficult to achieve both power and simplicity in practice. In this paper, we describe a new, modular analysis for a higher order language, which is both simple and effective. We prove the analysis sound with respect to a standard call-by-need semantics, and present measurements of its use in a full-scale, state-of-the-art optimising compiler. The analysis finds many single-entry thunks and one-shot lambdas and enables a number of program optimisations. This paper extends our preceding conference publication (Sergey et al. 2014 Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2014). ACM, pp. 335–348) with proofs, expanded report on evaluation and a detailed examination of the factors causing the loss of precision in the analysis.

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item