Compose group

Abstract The notion of exibility that is the ability to adapt to changing requirements or execution contexts is recognized as a key concern in structuring software and many architectures have been designed to that e ect However the corresponding implementations often come with performance and code size overheads The source of ineciency can be identied to be in the loose integration of components because exibility is often present not only at the design level but also in the implementation To solve this exibility vs eciency dilemma we advocate the use of partial evaluation which is an automated technique to produce ecient specialized instances of generic programs As supporting case studies we consider several exible mechanisms commonly found in software architectures selective broadcast pattern matching interpreters software layers and generic libraries Using Tempo our specializer for C we show how partial evaluation can safely optimize implementations of those mechanisms Because this optimization is automatic it preserves the original genericity and extensibility of the implementatio