[Pl-seminar] 11/6: William J. Bowman, "Profile-directed (meta-)programming"

[Vincent St-Amour]

Reminder: Billy is speaking at 11:45.

Vincent


At Mon, 04 Nov 2013 10:44:48 -0500,
Vincent St-Amour wrote:
> 
> NUPRL Seminar presents
> 
> William J. Bowman
> NUPRL
> 
> 11:45 - 1:30
> Wednesday, 11/6
> Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)
> 
> Profile-directed (meta-)programming
> 
> Meta-programming is a technique for creating programs by defining
> meta-language constructs that generate programs in a source language.
> Meta-programming enables creating new, high-level constructs to express
> the behavior of programs. Meta-programs are similar to compilers---they
> enable reasoning in a higher-level language but produce code in a
> lower-level language. To generate efficient source programs,
> meta-programmers need the same tools and techniques as compiler writers.
> 
> Profile-directed optimization (PDO) is a compiler technique that uses
> information such as execution counts, gathered from a sample run of a
> program, to inform optimization decisions. This profile information can
> be more precise than static heuristics. For instance, profile
> information can say exactly how many times a loop body is executed,
> while static heuristics can only estimate.
> 
> Until now, meta-programmers have not had access to profile information.
> This work presents a technique for doing profile-directed optimizations
> in meta-programs. We present a profiling system that gives per-source
> expression profile information and provides a way to access this profile
> information in the meta-language. This system is implemented in the
> high-performance Chez Scheme compiler, and used in implementing an
> internal Cisco project.
> 
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