Optimising compiler for a modern functional language

Abstract

One of the factors hindering the use of functional languages has been their relatively poor performance in comparison to more traditional languages such as C and Pascal. During the last decade tremendous progress has been made in building implementations of functional languages but the approaches adopted have employed specialist hardware and/or compiler optimisations that have been developed specifically for functional lanuages. Building specialist hardware may be the best long-term solution but in the short run it is possible to increase the use and acceptance of functional languages by exploiting the performance of commercially available machines. The goal of the project described in this paper has been to design an optimising compiler that produces fast code for functional languages on conventional sequential and parallel machines.