John Porter wrote:
>Jordan Dimov wrote:
>>Turchin has founded a start up (www.supercompilers.com) with the purpose
>>of developing a supercompiler for Java, speeding up Java code by a factor
>>of 100.
>
>The culture of Java encourages fantastic hyperbole.
Simon Cozens wrote:
>Jordan Dimov wrote:
>>Is anyone here familiar with the concept of supercompilation, as
>>described by prof. Valentin Turchin in [1] for example?
>>[...]
>>[1] ``The Concept of a Supercompiler'', Valenting F. Turchin, ACM Trans.
>>Program. Lang. Syst. 8, 3 (Jul 1986), pp. 292-325
>
>I've read this.
>[...]
>This isn't anything new, since most compilers do this anyway.
This must be a misunderstanding. As far as I understand modern
supercompilers are capable of transforming an interpreter into a compiler.
This seems to be just too revolutionary for most people to believe. The
speed-up factor of course depends on the kind of application. More
important is the idea to allow writing programs on a level of abstraction
which was not possible so far. Obviously there must be some hindrances for
the wide-spread use of this technology. Possibly the publicly available
tools only work on some advanced programming languages which aren't
understood by a lot of programmers, and may be they aren't very easy to
apply in ordinary practise.
There are quite a few papers about the subject, some of which can be found
here:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs?q=supercompiler&submit=Search+Documents&am=50
http://www.refal.com/english/s_compil.htm (home of supercompilation with
Refal, online examples)
http://www.diku.dk/topps/bibliography/bibl-aut.html (search for
/supercompil(er)|(ation)/ yields lots of hits)
http://www.diku.dk/users/rambo/publications.html (Master's Thesis with
detailed remarks about history)
http://www.dina.dk/~jesper/PEsummerschool/ (educational implementation &
tutorial)
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~jesper/CASE/ (educational implementation, examples)
>>Is Perl suitable for this kind of program transformation?
>
>Of course.
Jordan, possibly this wasn't the best mailing list to ask questions about
that subject. You could have more luck when you direct them to the Refal
mailing list:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The archive can be browsed here:
http://www.botik.ru/mail-archive/refal/
(Most messages are in Russian, but questions which are posted in English
are also replied to in English. Also some of the Russian messages are
nearly understandable after applying online-translation. Watch out not to
execute the attachment Microsoft_Word__3_.doc.bat.)
-- Helmut
(BCCed to Valentin F. Turchin, Andrei V. Klimov, Andrei P. Nemytykh)
________________________________
Helmut Enck-Radana
Paradigma Software GmbH
http://www.paradigma-software.de
________________________________
