CAT: The Copying Approach to Tabling

The SLG-WAM implements tabling by freezing the WAM stacks: this implementationtechnique has a reasonably small execution overhead , but is not easy to implement on top of an existing Prolog system. We here propose a new approach to the implementation of tabling: the Copying Approach to Tabling. CAT interferes absolutely not with normal Prolog execution and can be introduced in an existing Prolog system orthogonally. We have implemented CAT starting from XSB (i.e. taking out SLG-WAM and adding CAT) and the results show that in practical programs CAT slightly outperforms the SLG-WAM. We give a detailed account of the additions to be made to a WAM implementation for adopting CAT. We show a case in which CAT performs arbitrarily worse than SLG-WAM, but on the other hand we present empirical evidence that CAT is competitive and often faster than SLG-WAM. We discuss issues related to memory management and the impact of the scheduling strategy. Abstract The SLG-WAM implements tabling by freezing the WAM stacks: this implementation technique has a reasonably small execution overhead, but is not easy to implement on top of an existing Prolog system. We here propose a new approach to the implementation of tabling: the Copying Approach to Tabling. CAT interferes absolutely not with normal Prolog execution and can be introduced in an existing Prolog system orthogonally. We have implemented CAT starting from XSB (i.e. taking out SLG-WAM and adding CAT) and the results show that in practical programs CAT slightly outperforms the SLG-WAM. We give a detailed account of the additions to be made to a WAM implementation for adopting CAT. We show a case in which CAT performs arbitrarily worse than SLG-WAM, but on the other hand we present empirical evidence that CAT is competitive and often faster than SLG-WAM. We discuss issues related to memory management and the impact of the scheduling strategy.