Caching function calls using precise dependencies

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation of a purely functional programming language for building software systems. In this language, external tools like compilers and linkers are invoked by function calls. Because some function calls are extremely expensive, it is obviously important to reuse the results of previous function calls whenever possible. Caching a function call requires the language interpreter to record all values on which the function call depends. For optimal caching, it is important to record precise dependencies that are both dynamic and fine-grained. The paper sketches how we compute such dependencies, describes the implementation of an efficient function cache, and evaluates our implementation's performance.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. PLDI 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Dynamic purity analysis for java programs

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“…It can be useful in program understanding and analysis [13], isolating and examining functional or side effect free fragments [30], and verification in model checking [8]. When optimizing, improved method purity information allows for less conservative assumptions, and has been used to drive compiler optimization [9,19], novel hardware architectures [3], and caching or memoization of function calls [17].…”

NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution

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