A Case Study in Functional Conversion and Mode Inference in miniKanren

Abstract

Many programs which solve complicated problems can be seen as inversions of other, much simpler, programs. One particular example is transforming verifiers into solvers, which can be achieved with low effort by implementing the verifier in a relational language and then executing it in the backward direction. Unfortunately, as it is common with inverse computations, interpretation overhead may lead to subpar performance compared to direct program inversion. In this paper we discuss functional conversion aimed at improving relational miniKanren specifications with respect to a known fixed direction. Our preliminary evaluation demonstrates a significant performance increase for some programs which exemplify the approach.