Program Specialization

This book presents the principles and techniques of program specialization — a general method to make programs faster (and possibly smaller) when some inputs can be known in advance. As an illustration, it describes the architecture of Tempo, an offline program specializer for C that can also specialize code at runtime, and provides figures for concrete applications in various domains. Technical details address issues related to program analysis precision, value reification, incomplete program specialization, strategies to exploit specialized program, incremental specialization, and data specialization. The book, that targets both researchers and software engineers, also opens scientific and industrial perspectives.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The principles of program specialization
Chapter 2. Specialization techniques
Chapter 3. Offline specialization
Chapter 4. Tempo, a specializer for C programs
Chapter 5. Applications
Chapter 6. Precision of program analyses
Chapter 7. Reification: from values to terms
Chapter 8. Incomplete program specialization
Chapter 9. Exploiting specialization
Chapter 10. Incremental specialization at runtime
Chapter 11. Data specialization
Chapter 12. Scientific perspectives
Chapter 13. Conclusion: from prototype to product
Appendix A. Programs and programming languages