20100129 Lennart Augustsson_Partial Evaluator

Speaker

Lennart Augustsson, Standard Chartered Bank

Title

O, Partial Evaluator, Where Art Thou?

Abstract

Partial evaluation is now a quite old idea, and it has been implemented many times. Partial evaluation is also very widely applicable; almost every problem in computing could use it. But widely used partial evaluators are nowhere to be seen. Why is that? In this talk I will give some examples of where I have used partial evaluation during 15 years of using Haskell commercially. I will give my wish list for a partial evaluator I could actually use (instead of rewriting it over and over), and also contrast this with what is done in the research community. Lennart Augustsson is a person that turns research in programming languages into practice. He currently works at the Modelling and Analytics Group at Standard Chartered Bank designing domain-specific programming languages used for quantitative modelling. He is known as the author of Cayenne programming language, one of the first Haskell compilers - HBC and as coauthor of Bluespec, a hardware description language. He is also a three-time winner of the Obfuscated C Code Contest.

• 哥本哈根的研究 mix fun source
  mix interp src = compiled-src     -- may be useful
  mix mix interp = compiler           -- this could not produce good compiler, it is a gerneral operation
                                             -- this application is not very interesting
  
• Jeppesen 公司 航班安排软件 输入rules 输出一个可读的结果 可以基于结果再次调整
  reasons that partial evaluatio is good: parameters are fixed; some parameters can narrow down to everal values (eg. airport, aircraft type)
  This completed based on set computation
  
• R@ve
  partial evaluation can reduce the time consuming a lot :
  T Haskell compiling + T c compiling << T pure c compiling
  
• Bluespec
   - 硬件描述语言
  
• DSEL-谬语言