A Taxonomy of Functional Language Implementations : Part I : Call by Value

Overview & Synopsis

We present a unified framework to describe and compare functional language implementations. We express the compilation process as a succession of program transformations in the common framework. At each step, different transformatio- ns model fundamental choices or optimizations. A benefit of this approach is to structure and decompose the implementation process. The correctness proofs can be tackled independently for each step and amount to proving program transformations in the functional world. It also paves the way to formal comparisons by estimating the complexity of individual transformations or compositions of them. We focus on call-by-value implementations, describe and compare the diverse alternatives and classify well-known abstract machines. This work also aims to open the design space of functional language implementations and we suggest how distinct choices could be mixed to yield efficient hybrid abstract machines.