1 Partial Execution - An Easy Partial Evaluation

Partial evaluation, also known as automatic specialization, is a particular collection of techniques for improving the performance of an application. With clear benefits, but unclear implementation up until now, partial evaluation is little used in current computing practice. This soon will change. Presented here is partial execution, an alternative to symbolic evaluation the technique driving previous implementations of partial evaluation. In contrast to symbolic evaluation, partial execution is simply a part of the usual application execution. Partial execution thus avoids many of the problems introduced by symbolic evaluation. Partial execution is one of many execution features provided by the Task System and Item Architecture (TSIA) a project in its early stages.