Abstract
Modern compilera often implement function calls (or returns) in two steps: first, a "closure" environment is properly installed to provide access for free variables in the target program fragment; second, the control is transferred to the target by a "jump with arguments (or results)." Closure conversion - which decides where and how to represent closures at runtime - is a crucial step in the compilation of functional languages. This paper presents a new algorithm that exploits the use of compile-time control and data-flow information to optimize function calls. By extensive closure sharing and allocating as many closures in registers as possible, our new closure-conversion algorithm reduces heap allocation by 36% and memory fetches for local and global variables by 43%; and improves the already efficient code generated by an earlier version of the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler by about 17% on a DECstation 5000. Moreover, unlike most other approaches, our new closure-allocation scheme satisfies the strong safe-for-space-complexity rule, thus achieving good asymptotic space usage.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 129-161 |
Number of pages | 33 |
Journal | ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems |
Volume | 22 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2000 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Software
Keywords
- Algorithms
- D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Constructs and Features - Procedures, functions, and subroutines
- D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors - Compilers; optimization; closure conversion
- Languages
- Performance
- Theory