Partial evaluation for software engineering

Up to now partial evaluation has focused on the specialization process Less attention has been devoted to validating the technology on concrete applications This paper presents methods that are essential to integrate partial evaluation into the software engineering process either explicitly by declaring specialization opportunities or implicitly by using software architectures and mechanisms that are known to expose predictable specialization opportunities BEYOND THE SPECIALIZATION PROCESS Partial evaluation has been intensively studied in the past twenty years It has made major advances regarding the understanding of specialization from both a semantic and an implementation viewpoint Many variations with respect to various language paradigms and features have been explored Though prototype implementations have been putting theory into practice for several mainly declarative programming languages they have only been applied to small programs Less attention has been devoted to validating the technology on concrete applications Recently however attention has turned toward making a real proof of concept so as to convince potential endusers in various communities To do so a partia