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A Type-Based Compiler for Standard ML

Last modified: Tue Mar 14 19:34:40 2000 GMT.

Authors

Zhong Shao
Andrew Appel

Abstract

Compile-time type information should be valuable in efficient compilation of statically typed functional languages such as Standard ML. But how should type-directed compilation work in real compilers, and how much performance gain will type-based optimizations yield? In order to support more efficient data representations and gain more experience about type-directed compilation, we have implemented a new type-based middle end and back end for the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler. We describe the basic design of the new compiler, identify a number of practical issues, and then compare the performance of our new compiler with the old non-type-based compiler. Our measurement shows that a combination of several simple type-based optimizations reduces heap allocation by 36%; and improves the already-efficient code generated by the old non-type-based compiler by about 19% on a DECstation 5000.

Published

In Proc. 1995 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, La Jolla, CA, pages 116-129, June 1995. ©1995 ACM.

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Copyright Notice

Copyright © 1995 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1(212)869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.

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