Program generation for ML modules (short paper)

ABSTRACT

Program generation has been successful in various domains which need high performance and high productivity. Yet, programming-language supports for program generation need further improvement. An important omission is the functionality of generating modules in a type safe way. Inoue et al. have addressed this issue in 2016, but investigated only a few examples. We propose a language as an extension of (a small subset of) MetaOCaml in which one can manipulate and generate code of a module, and implement it based on a simple translation to MetaOCaml. We show that our language solves the performance problem in functor applications pointed out by Inoue et al., and that it provides a suitable basis for writing code generators for modules.

References

1. Jacques Carette, Oleg Kiselyov, and Chung-chieh Shan. 2009. Finally tagless, partially evaluated: Tagless staged interpreters for simpler typed languages. J. Funct. Program. 19, 5 (2009), 509–543.
2. Rowan Davies. 1996. A Temporal-Logic Approach to Binding-Time Analysis. In Proceedings, 11th Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, July 27-30, 1996. 184–195.
3. Robert Harper and Mark Lillibridge. 1994. A Type-Theoretic Approach to Higher-Order Modules with Sharing. In Conference Record of POPL’94: 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, Portland, Oregon, USA, January 17-21, 1994. 123–137.
4. Jun Inoue, Oleg Kiselyov, and Yukiyoshi Kameyama. 2016. Staging Beyond Terms: Prospects and Challenges. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 103–108.
5. Oleg Kiselyov. 2014. The Design and Implementation of BER MetaO-Caml - System Description. In Functional and Logic Programming -12th International Symposium, FLOPS 2014, Kanazawa, Japan, June 4-6, 2014. Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Michael Codish and Eijiro Sumii (Eds.), Vol. 8475. Springer, 86–102.
6. Oleg Kiselyov, Aggelos Biboudis, Nick Palladinos, and Yannis Smaragdakis. 2017. Stream fusion, to completeness. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2017, Paris, France, January 18-20, 2017, Giuseppe Castagna and Andrew D. Gordon (Eds.). ACM, 285–299. http://dl.acm.org/citation. cfm?id=3009880
7. Yannis Klonatos, Christoph Koch, Tiark Rompf, and Hassan Chafi. 2014. Building Efficient Query Engines in a High-Level Language. PVLDB 7, 10 (2014), 853–864.
8. Xavier Leroy. 2000. A Modular Module System. J. Funct. Program. 10, 3 (May 2000), 269–303.
9. Junpei Oishi and Yukiyoshi Kameyama. 2017. Staging with control: type-safe multi-stage programming with control operators. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences, GPCE 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 23-24, 2017. 29–40.
10. Tiark Rompf. 2016. Lightweight modular staging (LMS): generate all the things! (keynote). In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences, GPCE 2016, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 31 -November 1, 2016, Bernd Fischer and Ina Schaefer (Eds.). ACM, 1.
11. Kenichi Suzuki, Oleg Kiselyov, and Yukiyoshi Kameyama. 2016. Finally, Safely-extensible and Efficient Language-integrated Query. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 37–48.
12. Walid Taha. 2003. A Gentle Introduction to Multi-stage Programming. In Domain-Specific Program Generation, International Seminar, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, March 23-28, 2003, Revised Papers. 30–50.
13. Walid Taha and Michael Florentin Nielsen. 2003. Environment Classifiers. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL ’03). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 26–37.
14. Leo White, Frédéric Bour, and Jeremy Yallop. 2014. Modular implicits. In Proceedings ML Family/OCaml Users and Developers workshops, ML/OCaml 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 4-5, 2014. 22–63.
15. Jeremy Yallop. 2017. Staged generic programming. PACMPL 1, ICFP (2017), 29:1–29:29.

Index Terms

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

• Theory of computation

  • Logic

    • Type theory