Lightweight Languages for Interactive Graphics
Scott Draves · 1995
Run time code generation (RTCG) and traditional compilation are two ends of the same underlying optimization: factoring computations out of repeated procedure calls. Self-applicable partial evaluation (PE) is a semantics-based program transformation traditionally used for automatic compiler generation (cogen) . Recently, PE has also been applied to RTCG. My approach to RTCG is to implement a composable cogen for a compiler intermediate representation. My thesis is that this approach to optimizing programs can be particularly useful for interactive graphics toolkits. I intend to demonstrate this by implementing a compiler generator tuned for RTCG, and showing how it can be used to build software that is highly abstract and yet still as fast as less general programs.