https://github.com/melwyn95/compiling-to-closures

https://github.com/melwyn95/compiling-to-closures

Last synced: 24 days ago
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• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/melwyn95/compiling-to-closures
• Owner: melwyn95
• License: mit
• Created: 2024-11-25T20:10:12.000Z (about 2 months ago)
• Default Branch: main
• Last Pushed: 2024-12-08T17:05:11.000Z (about 1 month ago)
• Last Synced: 2024-12-08T17:24:53.644Z (about 1 month ago)
• Language: OCaml
• Size: 104 KB
• Stars: 3
• Watchers: 1
• Forks: 0
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.md
  • License: LICENSE

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README

        
# compiling-to-closures

A simple and elegent idea for code-generation

## Paper

Feeley, M., & Lapalme, G. (1987). Using closures for code generation. Computer Languages, 12(1), 47-66.

[Link](https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/FeeleyLapalmeCL87.pdf)

## Introduction

- Language implementation: interpreter or compiler

- Interpreter:

  - Easy to implement

  - Better debugging tools

  - Portable

- Compiler

  - Generated code runs faster

- Combine advantages of interpreter and compiler

## Closures

- Scheme: a dialect of Lisp

- In the paper Scheme as source and implementation language

- `lambda` is evaluated to a closure in Scheme

- Using Scheme closures to implement to Scheme compiler in Scheme

## Overview of the compiler

- The compiler targets a base subset of Scheme

  - Higher level constructs `begin`, `cond`, `let`, etc. can be desugared to the base subset

- A closure is generated for each primitive construct of the language

  - When a closure is applied it evaluates the part of original expression 

- A compiled form of an expression combines these closures into a network of closures

- See sections 3.1 to 3.6 for specifics of code generation for each construct

- Some optimizations

  - Can use a **simple list** rather than a assoc-list and use **indexing** to avoid comparisons when looking up vars

  - For commonly occuring constants **generate only one closure** and use to same closure everywhere rather than generating new closure each time

  - Can cache some closures in **LRU-hashtbl** to speed up the compilation process

## Benchmarks

- See section 7 of the paper

- For benchmarks of Haskell & OCaml code [checkout BENCHMARKS.md](./BENCHMARKS.md)