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A parallel virtual machine for efficient scheme compilation

Authors:

James S. MillerAuthors Info & Claims

LFP '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming

Pages 119 - 130

https://doi.org/10.1145/91556.91606

Published: 01 May 1990 Publication History

Abstract

Programs compiled by Gambit, our Scheme compiler, achieve performance as much as twice that of the fastest available Scheme compilers. Gambit is easily ported, while retaining its high performance, through the use of a simple virtual machine (PVM). PVM allows a wide variety of machine-independent optimizations and it supports parallel computation based on the future construct. PVM conveys high-level information bidirectionally between the machine-independent front end of the compiler and the machine-dependent back end, making it easy to implement a number of common back end optimizations that are difficult to achieve for other virtual machines.

PVM is similar to many real computer architectures and has an option to efficiently gather dynamic measurements of virtual machine usage. These measurements can be used in performance prediction for ports to other architectures as well as design decisions related to proposed optimizations and object representations.

References

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Joel Bartlett. $chm~e->g a portable Scheme-to-C compiler. Technical Report 8911, Digital Equipment Corp. Western Research Lab., 1989.

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John Befall, Edmund Goodhue, Chris Hanson, Howie Shrobe,. Richard M. Stallman, and Gerald Jay Sussman. The Scheme-81 architecture- system and chip. in Paul Penfield Jr., editor, Proc. of the MiT Confer. ence on Advanced Research in VLSi~ Dedham, Mass., 1982. Artech House.

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William Campbell. A C interpreter ~for Scheme ~-- an exercise in object-oriented design. Submitted to the Software Engineering journal of the British Computer Society, 1989.

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J6r6me Chailloux. La machine LLM3. Rapport interne du projet vlsi, INRIA, May 1984. Corresponds to LeLisp version 15.

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D. A. Kranz et at. Orbit: An optimizing compiler for Scheme. In Sgtmposium on Compiler Construction, pages 219-233. ACM SIGPLAN, June 1986.

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Mass. inst. of Technology, Cambridge, MA. MIT Scheme Reference, Scheme Release 7, 1988.

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James Miller. MtdtiScheme: A Parallel Processing System Based on MIT Scheme. PhD thesis, Mass. Inst. of Technology, August 1987. Available as MIT LCS/TR/402.

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James Miller. Implementing a Scheme-based parallel processing system, international Journal o} Parallel Processing, 17(5), October 1988.

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James Miller and Christopher Hanson. IEEE Draft Standard for the Programming Language Scheme. iEEE. forthcoming.

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James Miller and Guillermo Rozas. Free variables and first-class environments. Journal of Lisp and Symbolic Computation, to appear.

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Guillermo Rozas. Liar, an Algol-like compiler for Scheme. Bachelor's thesis, Mass. Inst. of Technology, 1984.

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Cited By

Wang CCheung ABodik R(2017)Synthesizing highly expressive SQL queries from input-output examplesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140587.306236552:6(452-466)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062365
Bornholt JTorlak E(2017)Synthesizing memory models from framework sketches and Litmus testsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140587.306235352:6(467-481)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062353
Feeley M(2015)Compiling for multi-language task migrationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2936313.281671351:2(63-77)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2015
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Index Terms

A parallel virtual machine for efficient scheme compilation
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Parallel architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types

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cover image ACM Conferences

LFP '90: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming

May 1990

348 pages

ISBN:089791368X

DOI:10.1145/91556

Chairman:
Gilles Kahn

Copyright © 1990 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence
SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages
SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
SIGSAM: ACM Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation
INRIA: Institut Natl de Recherche en Info et en Automatique

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 1990

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LFP90: ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming

June 27 - 29, 1990

Nice, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 30 of 109 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Wang CCheung ABodik R(2017)Synthesizing highly expressive SQL queries from input-output examplesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140587.306236552:6(452-466)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062365
Bornholt JTorlak E(2017)Synthesizing memory models from framework sketches and Litmus testsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3140587.306235352:6(467-481)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3140587.3062353
Feeley M(2015)Compiling for multi-language task migrationACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2936313.281671351:2(63-77)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2936313.2816713
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Della Toffola LPradel MGross T(2015)Performance problems you can fix: a dynamic analysis of memoization opportunitiesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2858965.281429050:10(607-622)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2015
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