Andrei M. Chepovsky, Andrei V. Klimov, Arkady V. Klimov, Yuri A. Klimov, Andrei S. Mishchenko, Sergei A. Romanenko, Sergei Yu. Skorobogatov. Partial Evaluation for Common Intermediate Language. In Manfred Broy, Alexandre V. Zamulin, editors, Perspectives of Systems Informatics, 5th International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference, PSI 2003, Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Russia, July 9-12, 2003, Revised Papers. Volume 2890 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 171-177, Springer, 2003. [doi]
Partial Evaluation is a well-established method for specialization of programs in functional languages. However, real-world applications demand specialization of object-oriented languages. With the advent of the Microsoft .NET platform with Common Intermediate Language (CIL), to which multiple languages are compiled, various program analysis and transformation techniques, including partial evaluation, can be developed once for a low-level language rather than over and over again to various high-level languages. The CILPE Project aims at developing a practical specializer for CIL programs based on Partial Evaluation with preliminary analysis referred to as Binding Time Analysis (BTA). The CILPE Specializer partially evaluates operations on values and objects determined by BTA as static. Static objects are created, processed and destroyed at specialization time; they may be mutable and can have some fields unknown (dynamic). Arbitrary verifiable CIL code is allowed as input.