Partial Evaluation for Constraint-Based Program Analyses

Abstract

We report on a case study in the application of partial evaluation, initiated
by the desire to speed up a constraint-based algorithm for control-flow
analysis. We designed and implemented a dedicated partial evaluator,
able to specialize the analysis wrt. a given constraint graph and thus
remove the interpretive overhead, and measured it with Feeley's Scheme
benchmarks. Even though the gain turned out to be rather limited, our
investigation yielded valuable feed back in that it provided a better understanding
of the analysis, leading us to (re)invent an incremental version.
We believe this phenomenon to be a quite frequent spinoff from using
partial evaluation, since the removal of interpretive overhead makes the flow
of control more explicit and hence pinpoints sources of inefficiency.
Finally, we observed that partial evaluation in our case yields such regular,
low-level specialized programs that it begs for run-time code generation.