Generating heap-bounded programs in a functional setting

Abstract

High-level programming languages offer significant expressivity but provide little or no guarantees about resource utilization. Resource-bounded languages provide strong guarantees about the runtime behavior of programs but often lack mechanisms that allow programmers to write more structured, modular, and reusable programs. To overcome this basic tension in language design, this paper advocates taking into account the natural distinction between the development platform and the deployment platform for resource-sensitive software. To illustrate this approach, we develop the meta-theory for GeHB, a two-level language in which first stage computations can involve arbitrary resource consumption, but the second stage can only involve functional programs that do not require new heap allocations. As an example of a such a second-stage language we use the recently proposed first-order functional language LFPL. LFPL can be compiled directly to malloc-free, imperative C code. We show that all generated programs in GeHB can be transformed into well-typed LFPL programs, thus ensuring that the results established for LFPL are directly applicable to GeHB. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.