Abstract
The implementation of abstract machines involves complex decisions regarding, e.g., data representation, opcodes, or instruction specialization levels, all of which affect the final performance of the emulator and the size of the bytecode programs in ways that are often difficult to foresee. Besides, studying alternatives by implementing abstract machine variants is a time-consuming and error-prone task because of the level of complexity and optimization of competitive implementations, which makes them generally difficult to understand, maintain, and modify. This also makes it hard to generate specific implementations for particular purposes. To ameliorate those problems, we propose a systematic approach to the automatic generation of implementations of abstract machines. Different parts of their definition (e.g., the instruction set or the internal data and bytecode representation) are kept separate and automatically assembled in the generation process. Alternative versions of the abstract machine are therefore easier to produce, and variants of their implementation can be created mechanically, with specific characteristics for a particular application if necessary. We illustrate the practicality of the approach by reporting on an implementation of a generator of production-quality WAMs which are specialized for executing a particular fixed (set of) program(s). The experimental results show that the approach is effective in reducing emulator size.
Work partially funded by the European Commission IST-FET programme, IST- 2001-38059 ASAP project, and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education, TIC 2002-0055 CUBICO project. Manuel Hermenegildo is also supported by the Prince of Asturias Chair in Information Science and Technology at UNM. J. Morales is also supported by an MCYT/MEC fellowship co-financed by the European Social Fund.
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Morales, J.F., Carro, M., Puebla, G., Hermenegildo, M.V. (2005). A Generator of Efficient Abstract Machine Implementations and Its Application to Emulator Minimization. In: Gabbrielli, M., Gupta, G. (eds) Logic Programming. ICLP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3668. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11562931_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11562931_5
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