A pragmatic approach to the analysis and compilation of lazy functional languages

The aim of the FAST Project is to provide an implementation of a functional language, Haskell, on a transputer array. An important component of the system is a highly optimising compiler for Haskell to a single transputer. This paper presents a methodology for describing the optimisations and code generation for such a compiler, which allows the exploitation of many standard and some new techniques in a clear and concise notation. Results are included showing that the optimisations give significant improvement over the standard combinator and (Johnsson's 1984) G-machine implementations