Deriving compilers and virtual machines for a multi-level language

Abstract

We develop virtual machines and compilers for a multi-level language, which supports multi-stage specialization by composing program fragments with quotation mechanisms. We consider two styles of virtual machines-ones equipped with special instructions for code generation and ones without-and show that the latter kind can deal with, more easily, low-level code generation, which avoids the overhead of (runtime) compilation by manipulating instruction sequences, rather than source-level terms, as data. The virtual machines and accompanying compilers are derived by program transformation, which extends Ager et al.'s derivation of virtual machines from evaluators. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.