RESOURCE-BOUNDED PARTIAL EVALUATION

Most partial evaluators do not take the availability of machine-level resources, such as registers or cache, into consideration when making their specialization decisions. The resulting resource contention can lead to severe performance degradation-causing, in extreme cases, the specialized code to run slower than the unspecialized code. In this pa per we consider how resource considerations can be incorporated within a partial evaluator. We develop an abstract formulation of the proble m, show that optimal resource-bounded partial evaluation is NP-complet e, and discuss simple heuristics that can be used to address the probl em in practice.