Two talks for the price of one!
Implementing Typed Intermediate Languages
Christopher League
Recent advances in compiler technology have demonstrated the benefits of using strongly typed intermediate languages to compile richly typed source languages (e.g., ML). A type-preserving compiler can use types to guide advanced optimizations and to help generate provably secure mobile code. Types, unfortunately, are very hard to represent and manipulate efficiently; a naive implementation can easily add exponential overhead to the compilation and execution of a program. This paper describes our experience with implementing the FLINT typed intermediate language in the SML/NJ production compiler. We observe that a type-preserving compiler will not scale to handle large types unless all of its type-preserving stages preserve the asymptotic time and space usage in representing and manipulating types. We present a series of novel techniques for achieving this property and give empirical evidence of their effectiveness.
This is a joint work with Zhong Shao and Stefan Monnier.
Typed Cross-Module Compilation
Zhong Shao
Higher-order modules are very effective in structuring large programs and defining generic, reusable software components. Unfortunately, many compilation techniques for core languages do not work across the module boundaries. As a result, few optimizing compilers support these module facilities well.
This paper exploits the semantic properties of ML-style modules to support efficient cross-module compilation. More specifically, we present a type-directed translation of the MacQueen-Tofte higher-order modules into a predicative variant of the polymorphic lambda-calculus Fomega. Because modules can be compiled in the same way as ordinary polymorphic functions, standard type-based optimizations such as representation analysis immediately carry over to the module languages.
We further show that the full-transparency property of the MacQueen-Tofte system yields a near optimal cross-module compilation framework. By propagating various static information through the module boundaries, many static program analyses for the core languages can be extended to work across higher-order modules.