Jones optimality, binding-time improvements, and the strength of program specializers

Abstract

Jones optimality tells us that a program specializer is strong enough to remove an entire level of self-interpretation. We show that Jones optimality, which was originally aimed at the Futamura projections, plays an important role in binding-time improvements. The main results show that, regardless of the binding-time improvements which we apply to a source program, no matter how extensively, a specializer that is not Jones-optimal is strictly weaker than a specializer which is Jones optimal. By viewing a binding-time improver as a generating extension of a self-interpreter, we can connect our results with previous work on the interpretive approach.

Specialising Interpreters Using Offline Partial Deduction

“…We have already discussed related work in the logic programming community [42,47,44,5,7,26,50,28]. In the functional community there has been a lot of recent interest in Jones optimality; see [19,36,46,13]. For example, [13] shows theoretically the interest of having a Jones-optimal specialiser and the results should also be relevant for logic programming.…”

Offline partial evaluation can be as accurate as online partial evaluation

“…Beside partial evaluation [Jones et al 1993], which is based on constant propagation, there exist other, powerful specialization techniques based on unification, such as supercompilation [Turchin 1986] and partial deduction [Lloyd and Shepherdson 1991], or theorem proving, such as generalized partial computation [Futamura and Nogi 1988] and the specialization method in Chang and Lee [1973], which we will not consider in this paper (for a detailed comparison see Glück and Klimov [1993]; Glück andSørensen [1994, 1996]; Sørensen et al [1996]). …”

RS-2 Tagging, Encoding, and Jones Optimality

“…Furthermore, the term "identical modulo renaming" in the definition of Jones optimality has evolved into "at least as efficient" [17,25].…”