Deriving Compilers and Virtual Machines for a Multi-level Language

We develop virtual machines and compilers for a multi-level language, which supports multi-stage specialization by composing program fragments with quotation mechanisms. We consider two styles of virtual machines--ones equipped with special instructions for code generation and ones without--and show that the latter kind can deal with, more easily, low-level code generation, which avoids the overhead of (runtime) compilation by manipulating instruction sequences, rather than source-level terms, as data. The virtual machines and accompanying compilers are derived by program transformation, which extends Ager et al.'s derivation of virtual machines from evaluators.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: APLAS
• Authors: Atsushi Igarashi, Masashi Iwaki
• Keywords: APLAS 2007, Code Generation, Low-level Code Generation, Programming Languages, Virtual Machines