marquisthunder/erlscp

A supercompiler pass for Erlang

erlscp

A supercompiler pass for Erlang. Brought back from the ashes by [email protected].

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Copyright (C) 2013 Göran Weinholt [email protected]

• What erlscp is and what it is used for

The Erlang Supercompiler (erlscp for short) is a parse transform that is capable of removing many redundancies in Erlang code. It can optimise code but it also has many other metacomputational uses that have not been fully explored in the context of this project.

Those interested in the algorithm may peruse these publications:

Peter A. Jonsson and Johan Nordlander. Positive supercompilation for a higher order call-by-value language. In /Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages/, POPL '09, pages 277--288, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

Peter A. Jonsson and Johan Nordlander. Strengthening supercompilation for call-by-value languages. In Andrei P. Nemytykh, editor, /Proceedings of the second International Valentin Turchin Memorial Workshop on Metacomputation in Russia/, pages 64--81. Ailamazyan University of Pereslavl, July 2010.

Peter A. Jonsson and Johan Nordlander. Taming code explosion in supercompilation. In /Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Partial evaluation and program manipulation/, PEPM '11, pages 33--42, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.

Peter A. Jonsson. /Time- and Size-Efficient Supercompilation/. PhD thesis, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå Sweden, 2011.

Göran Weinholt. /Supercompiling Erlang/. Master's thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, 2013.

• Before you use erlscp

Before using erlscp you will need to have Erlang installed. The only version that has been tested is Erlang R15B01. Another requirement is erlang-syntax-tools.

Currently erlscp does not support the full Erlang language. The treatment of patterns is simplistic and support for some expression types is missing. You may need to read the supercompiler output to determine if the code got better.

Something will happen if the supercompiled module contains side-effects such as message passing, and it will probably not be something good.

• How to use erlscp

(There is probably some nice way of packaging Erlang modules so that this stuff is easier, but that is for the future.)

Obtain a copy of erlscp from this website:

http://weinholt.se/gitweb/?p=erlscp.git

A tarball can be obtained from this URL:

http://weinholt.se/gitweb/?p=erlscp.git;a=snapshot;h=HEAD;sf=tgz

The source code repository can be cloned with this command:

git clone http://weinholt.se/git/erlscp.git/

Compile erlscp using make (which might need to be GNU make). This will produce a few .beam files in the ebin directory. This is the directory that you need to add to Erlang's path.

Add this line to the Erlang module that you want to supercompile:

-compile({parse_transform, erlang_supercompiler}).

Then you can invoke the Erlang compiler as per usual, but make sure that you have added the ebin directory to its path (e.g. by invoking erlc with the flags -pa path/to/erlscp/ebin).

tl;dr: git clone http://weinholt.se/git/erlscp.git/ cd erlscp make cat > foo.erl << EOF -module(foo). -export([append/3]). -compile({parse_transform, erlang_supercompiler}). append(Xs, Ys, Zs) -> (Xs ++ Ys) ++ Zs. EOF erlc -pa ebin foo.erl erlc -P -pa ebin foo.erl less foo.P

• Possible side-effects

Due to incomplete handling of pattern matching it is currently possible for the supercompiler to introduce allocations of tuples.

The supercompiler has not been tamed and code explosion is possible.

If the second or higher Futamura projections are used then the supercompiler output is a derivative of erlscp. This means that the license in LICENSE.txt is applicable to the supercompiled program. This only applies to when the supercompiler is applied to itself (as in the Futamura projections mentioned). Merely using erlscp for optimisations does not make the output a derivative of erlscp.

Not that the Futamura projections can be used with erlscp yet, but, you know, just in case that day ever comes. A man can dream.

• How to properly store erlscp

Store on a digital medium and outside the reach of children. Dispose of in the bitbucket. Patches are submitted to the author by email.

• Other information

This README was modelled after an informational paper slip that came in a package of medicine. I've left out the parts about pregnancy and heavy machinery.