C Program Specialization Master ’ s

Automatic program specialization has numerous application areas ranging from specialization of scientific computation to automatic compiler generation. During the last decade, several automatic partial evaluators have been developed and demonstrated their usefulness. However, none of these have both been for a typed imperative language and self-applicable. The main content of this thesis is the development of an automatic self-applicable program specializer for a substantial subset of the C programming language. The use of an imperative language introduce many problems not present in partial evaluation of functional languages. New problems addressed and solved in this thesis includes handling of static side-effects under dynamic control, treatment of the imperative data structures arrays and structures, partially static data structures and specialization time splitting of these, and representation of values and programs for efficient self-application. In the thesis we recall the foundation of partial evaluation and reformulate basic concepts in a typed framework. We define a kernel subset of the C programming language, and specify the semantics formally by the means of an operational semantics. Based on an analysis of new problems we provide a formally specification of a C program specializer. We define a two-level language, impose wellannotatedness requirements, and finally provide a two-level operational semantics. The two-level semantics specify the program specializer. A binding time analysis is developed via type inference. The analysis can be implemented efficiently via a constraint set solving algorithm. The same technique is applied in the construction of an untagging analysis, which is used for simplification of the types in residual programs. In the last part of the thesis some experimental results are reported and assessments given. To the best of our knowledge this is the first successfully developed and implemented self-applicable program specializer for a “real-scale”, imperative and typed language.