Tuesday, November 12, 2013
11:00am Meeting room 302 (Mountain View), level 3
Ilya Sergey, Post-doctoral Researcher, IMDEA Software Institute
Modular, Higher-Order Cardinality Analysis in Theory and Practice
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 my talk, I will describe a new, modular analysis for a higher-order language, which is both simple and effective, 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.