On Jones-Optimal Specialization for Strongly Typed Languages

Abstract

Abstract. The phrase optimal program specialization" was de nedby Jones et al. in 1993 to capture the idea of a specializer being strong enough to remove e n tire layers of interpretation. As it has become clear that it does not imply optimality" in the everyday meaning of the word, we propose to rename the concept Jones-optimality". We argue that the 1993 de nition of Jones-optimality is in principle impossible to ful l for strongly typed languages due to necessary encodings on the inputs and outputs of a well-typed self-interpreter. We propose a technical correction of the de nition which allows Jones-optimality t o remain a meaningful concept for typed languages. We extend recent w ork by Hughes and by T aha and Makholm on the long-unsolved problem of Jones-optimal specialization for strongly typed languages. The methods of Taha and Makholm are enhanced to allow almost optimal" results when a self-interpreter is specialized to a typeincorrect program; how to do this has been an open problem since 1987. Neither Hughes' nor Taha Makholm's methods are by themselves sucient for Jones-optimal specialization when the language contains primitive operations that produce or consume complex data types. A simple postprocess is proposed to solve the problem. An implementation of the proposed techniques has been produced and used for the rst successful practical experiments with truly Jones-optimal specialization for strongly typed languages.

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

“…The results in this paper extend previous work on Jones optimality [18,28,22,32] and the interpretive approach [11,13,34]. We will see that Jones optimality [18] plays a key role in the power of binding-time improvers and, together with static expression reduction, establishes a certain kind of non-triviality.…”

“…Remark: In the literature [22], Jones optimality is often defined using r = r instead of t r (y) ≤ tr (y). Under this assumption, it follows directly from the rhs in Thm.…”

“…6.4]. Since the power of a specializer can be judged in many different ways, we use the term "Jones optimality" as proposed in [22]. These works focus on the problem of self-application; none of them considers the role of Jones-optimal specialization for binding-time improvements.…”

Efficient and flexible access control via logic program specialisation

“…For query Q3 the specialised interpreter (see Appendix A) is actually almost identical to the database without access control. 4 We have thus actually achieve what is called "Jones optimality" [13,14,18,15] (called the "optimality criterion" in [14]). The only drawback of the aggressive specialisation is that each time senior to changes there is an overhead of 10ms for specialisation (as well as the time needed to load the new specialised interpreter, which was around 10ms in our experiments).…”

Supervising Offline Partial Evaluation of Logic Programs Using Online Techniques

“…An offline system for logic programming is the logen system [19]. logen has successfully been applied to non-trivial interpreters, and can be used to achieve Jones-optimality [23]. for a variety of interpreters [17], i.e., completely removing the interpretation overhead.…”