A Scala framework for supercompilation

Abstract

Supercompilation is a program transformation technique that attempts to evaluate programs as much as possible at compile time. Supercompilation has been used for theorem proving, function inversion, and most notably optimization, especially of functional programs. However, the technique has numerous practical problems that prevent it from being applied in mainstream compilers. In this paper, we describe a framework that can be used for experimenting with supercompilation techniques. Our framework allows supercompilers to be constructed directly from an interpreter. The user specifies the interpreter using rewrite rules and the framework handles termination checking, generalization, and residualization. We demonstrate the approach by implementing a supercompiler for JavaScript.