Interfac-directed partial evaluation

Type-directed partial evaluation (TDPE) is a mechanism for generating specialized programs via ordinary program execution. It was originally developed for functional languages that subsume the lambda-calculus. In this paper, we show how to extend TDPE to work on object-oriented source languages, such as Java, and to generate residual programs directly into low-level representations, such as Java Virtual Machine bytecode. Our approach works for an assignment-free, fully-object-oriented subset of Java (resembling Smalltalk). We give general algorithms for constructing Java code to perform rei cation and re ection, based solely on interface speci cations. Our rei cation algorithm introduces explicit environment management in the residualized code to handle non-local variables. We describe a uniform treatment of primitive types and operations that relies on cross-stage persistence of values. We have implemented a prototype partial evaluator that generates JVM bytecode directly, and then dynamically loads and executes it, thus achieving a \self-improving" executable binary.

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