Saturday, July 10, 2010

Rethinking Supercompilation

I have written a paper building on my Supero work that has been accepted to ICFP 2010. Various people have asked for copies of the paper, so I have put the current version online. This version will be removed in about three weeks and replaced with the final version, although the linked copy has nearly all the changes suggested by the reviewers. The abstract is:

Supercompilation is a program optimisation technique that is particularly effective at eliminating unnecessary overheads. We have designed a new supercompiler, making many novel choices, including different termination criteria and handling of let bindings. The result is a supercompiler that focuses on simplicity, compiles programs quickly and optimises programs well. We have benchmarked our supercompiler, with some programs running more than twice as fast than when compiled with GHC.


I've also uploaded a corresponding package to Hackage, but that code should be considered an early version - I intend to revise it before ICFP, to make it easier to run (currently I change the options by editing the source code) and include all the benchmarks. I don't recommend downloading or using the current version, and won't be supporting it in any way, but it's there for completeness.

In the near future I will be posting more general discussions about supercompilation, and about the work covered in this paper. In the meantime, if you find any mistakes in the paper, please mention them in the comments!

PS. Currently community.haskell.org is down, but I have uploaded the paper there anyway. It should be present when the site recovers.