RUI: Testing and Enhancing a Prototype Program Fusion Engine

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9900510 Bates, PatriciaModular program construction offers many benefits, including increased reliability, clarity, and maintainability of software components. Unfortunately, modular programs are typically less efficient than their nonmodular counterparts. Warm fusion is a technique for improving the efficiency of modularly constructed programs by eliminating from them data structures whose sole purpose is to "glue" together smaller program components into larger ones. A fully automatic warm fusion engine has recently been developed, and this prototype successfully eliminates such data structures from a restricted, but pervasive, class of functional programs. This research focuses on extending the existing engine to accommodate more flexible and more widely applicable warm fusion heuristics. It also involves comprehensive testing of the extended prototype so that conditions under which the implemented warm fusion techniques succeed and fail in practice can be determined; this information will be used to quantify program improvement attributable to warm fusion, as well as to develop more general fusion techniques. The ultimate goal of the research is to sufficiently enhance the existing engine so that the resulting system is suitable for incorporation into state-of-the-art functional language compilers.