Re: Supercompiled Perl

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
________________________________