Smartest Recompilation

Last modified: Tue Mar 14 19:33:06 2000 GMT.

Authors

Abstract

To separately compile a program module in traditional statically-typed languages, one has to manually write down an import interface which explicitly specifies all the external symbols referenced in the module. Whenever the definitions of these external symbols are changed, the module has to be recompiled. In this paper, we present an algorithm which can automatically infer the ``minimum'' import interface for any module in languages based on the Damas-Milner type discipline (e.g., ML). By ``minimum,'' we mean that the interface specifies a set of assumptions (for external symbols) that are just enough to make the module type-check and compile. By compiling each module using its ``minimum'' import interface, we get a separate compilation method that can achieve the following optimal property: A compilation unit never needs to be recompiled unless its own implementation changes.

Published

In Proc. Twentieth ACM Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, Charleston, SC, page 439-450, January 1993. ©1993 ACM.
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Technical Report PU-CS-TR-395, Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, October 1992.
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Copyright Notice

Copyright © 1993 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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