Heap Profiling of a Lazy Functional Compiler

This paper reports on the experimental application of heap profiling to Augustsson and Johnsson's Lazy ML (LML) compiler [1]. Since our implementation of heap profiling is itself based on the LML compiler, this amounts to a boot-strapping exercise. The LML compiler extends to some 16,500 lines of code in almost 200 modules, and is by any standard a large and sophisticated piece of software. As it has been developed over a period of almost a decade, with each successive version outperforming its predecessor, the sort of dramatic improvement obtained for the clausify program is hardly to be expected; bu