Optimizing Reflective Languages by Using Partial Evaluation

We present techniques of compiling a reflective concurrent object-oriented language, ABCL/R3, by using partial evaluation. Although the compilation framework is based on the first Futamura projection, mere application of partial evaluation cannot improve performance due to concurrent, object-oriented, and dynamically modifiable design in ABCL/R3. Instead of developing a dedicated partial evaluator for ABCL/R3, we specialize the meta-level by applying sequential partial evaluator after translating the meta-level into sequential programs. We also showed a framework to specialize programs that are modified at run-time by using dynamic code generation techniques. Our techniques presented in the paper could also be useful to other programs with ‘impure’ features, such as concurrency, object-oriented style, and dynamic modification.