Practical partial evaluation
Rajeev Surati · 1995
Partial evaluation techniques have been known to yield order of magnitude speedups of real-world applications. Despite this tremendous potential, partial evaluators are rarely put to practical use. This is primarily because it is not easy for users to extend partial evaluators to work on their specific applications. This thesis describes Blitzkrieg, a user-extensible online partial evaluator designed to make partial evaluation more accessible to a wider class of users and applications. Blitzkrieg uses an object system to simplify the implementation of the partial evaluation system and to allow users to easily express their own domain-specific optimizations. The viability of Blitzkrieg is shown by applying it to the Stormer integrator on a 6-body problem (achieving a factor of 610 speedup) and the Runge-Kutta integrator on the same problem (a factor of 365.5 speedup). In addition, the flexibility of the approach is demonstrated by applying Blitzkrieg to handle port input programs, ac...