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Description and Optimization of Abstract Machines in a Dialect of Prolog*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2015

JOSÉ F. MORALES ,
MANUEL CARRO  and
MANUEL HERMENEGILDO
JOSÉ F. MORALES
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])
MANUEL CARRO
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) School of Computer Science, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain (email: [email protected], [email protected])
MANUEL HERMENEGILDO
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) School of Computer Science, Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain (email: [email protected], [email protected])
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Abstract

In order to achieve competitive performance, abstract machines for Prolog and related languages end up being large and intricate, and incorporate sophisticated optimizations, both at the design and at the implementation levels. At the same time, efficiency considerations make it necessary to use low-level languages in their implementation. This makes them laborious to code, optimize, and, especially, maintain and extend. Writing the abstract machine (and ancillary code) in a higher-level language can help tame this inherent complexity. We show how the semantics of most basic components of an efficient virtual machine for Prolog can be described using (a variant of) Prolog. These descriptions are then compiled to C and assembled to build a complete bytecode emulator. Thanks to the high-level of the language used and its closeness to Prolog, the abstract machine description can be manipulated using standard Prolog compilation and optimization techniques with relative ease. We also show how, by applying program transformations selectively, we obtain abstract machine implementations whose performance can match and even exceed that of state-of-the-art, highly-tuned, hand-crafted emulators.

Keywords

Abstract machinescompilationoptimizationprogram transformationprologlogic languages
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 1 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

This is a significantly extended and revised version of the paper “Towards Description and Optimization of Abstract Machines in an Extension of Prolog” published in the proceedings of the 2006 International Symposium on Logic-based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR'06) (Morales et al.2007).

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