Asymptotic speedups, bisimulation and distillation (Work in progress)

Abstract

Distillation is a fully automatic program transformation that can yield superlinear program speedups. Bisimulation is a key to the proof that distillation is correct, i.e., preserves semantics. However the proof, based on observational equivalence, is insensitive to program running times. This paper shows how distillation can give superlinear speedups on some “old chestnut” programs well-known from the early program transformation literature: naive reverse, factorial sum, and Fibonacci.