Partial Evaluation of C and Automatic Compiler Generation (Extended Abstract)

) Lars Ole Andersen DIKU, Department of University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1, DK 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark. E-mail: lars@diku.dk Abstract. A partial evaluator is a program transformator which as input take a program and parts of its input, and as output produce a specialized residual program. When applied to the rest of the input data, the residual program yields same result as the orignal program. The aim is efficiency: the residual program often runs an order of magnitude faster. We have developed a self-applicable partial evaluator for a substantial subset of the C programming language. The possibility of self-application enables generation of stand-alone compilers from executable specifications, for example interpreters. 1 Introduction During the last decade partial evaluation has proven its usefulness in numerous areas ranging from specialization of scientific computation [3], to specialization of general scanners [9], to automatic compiler generation [4,5]. The aim ..