Building program optimizers with rewriting strategies

Abstract

A language for defining term rewriting strategies and its application to the production of program optimizers is described. Valid transformations on program terms is described by a set of rewrite rules, rewriting strategies are used to describe when and how the various rules should be applied in order to obtain the desired optimization effects. Separating rules from strategies in this fashion makes it easier to reason about the behavior of the optimizer as a whole. The expressiveness of the language by using it to describe a simple optimizer for an ML-like intermediate representation is presented.