Preliminary Report on a Self-Applicable Online Partial Evaluator for Flowchart

This is a preliminary report on a self-applicable online partial evaluator for a flowchart language with recursive calls. Self-application of the partial evaluator yields generating extensions that are as efficient as those reported in the literature for offline partial evaluation. This result is remarkable because partial evaluation folklore has indicated that online partial evaluation techniques unavoidably lead to overgeneralized generating extensions. The purpose of this paper is not to argue which line of partial evaluation is better, but to show how the problem can be solved by recursive polyvariant specialization. The online partial evaluator, its techniques and implementation, are presented in a complete way. Full self-application according to the Futamura projections is demonstrated.