đź“–Compiling with continuations, or without? whatever.

authors
Cong, Youyou and Osvald, Leo and Essertel, Grégory M and Rompf, Tiark
year
2019
  • builds on top of Maurer…2017
    • add a control operator to eliminates certain redundant rewrites
    • treat non-returning and non-escaping aspects of continuations separately
    • selective CPS translation of IR, which erases control operators while preserving the meaning and typing of programs

  • q

    Thus, we change the spectrum of available options from “CPS yes or no” to “as much or as little CPS as you want, when you want it.”

  • this paper comes from experience implementing MiniScala compiler

  • q

    our experiment shows that a subsequent CPS pass may have a positive impact on the overall performance of the compiler.

  • Functional compilers have to do CPS translation anyway (when targeting CFG-based IRs in SSA-form—e.g., LLVM), so for each optimization you can decide whether to run it before or after CPS.
  • 1st-class values never refer to 2nd-class values
    • 1st-class values are heap-allocated
    • 2nd-class values are kept on the stack