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Implicitly Heterogeneous Multi-Stage Programming

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Abstract

Previous work on semantics-based multi-stage programming (MSP) language design focused on homogeneous designs, where the generating and the generated languages are the same. Homogeneous designs simply add a hygienic quasi-quotation and evaluation mechanism to a base language. An apparent disadvantage of this approach is that the programmer is bound to both the expressivity and performance characteristics of the base language. This paper proposes a practical means to avoid this by providing specialized translations from subsets of the base language to different target languages. This approach preserves the homogeneous “look” of multi-stage programs, and, more importantly, the static guarantees about the generated code. In addition, compared to an explicitly heterogeneous approach, it promotes reuse of generator source code and systematic exploration of the performance characteristics of the target languages.

To illustrate the proposed approach, we design and implement a translation to a subset of C suitable for numerical computation, and show that it preserves static typing. The translation is implemented, and evaluated with several benchmarks. The implementation is available in the online distribution of MetaOCaml.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rice University, P.O. Box 1892, MS 132, Houston, TX, 77005, USA

    Jason Eckhardt, Roumen Kaiabachev, Emir Pasalic, Kedar Swadi & Walid Taha

Authors
  1. Jason Eckhardt
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  2. Roumen Kaiabachev
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  3. Emir Pasalic
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  4. Kedar Swadi
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  5. Walid Taha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jason Eckhardt.

Additional information

Supported by NSF SoD-0439017 “Synthesizing Device Drivers”, NSF ITR-0113569 “Putting Multi-Stage Annotations to Work”, Texas ATP 003604-0032-2003 “Advanced Languages Techniques for Device Drivers” and NSF ITR-0205303 “Building Practical Compilers Based on Adaptive Search.”

This is a revised version based on a conference paper of the same title4).

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Eckhardt, J., Kaiabachev, R., Pasalic, E. et al. Implicitly Heterogeneous Multi-Stage Programming. New Gener. Comput. 25, 305–336 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-007-0020-x

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