Dynamic Specialization in the Fabius System
Mark Leone and Peter Lee

ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 30, No. 3es
1998 Symposium on Partial Evaluation
Edited by Olivier Danvy, Robert Gluck, and Peter Thiemann 


Opportunities for specialization abound during program execution.  Dynamic
specialization exploits run-time values that are not available at compile
time, yielding code that is often superior to statically optimal code.
This paper surveys the design of the Fabius compiler, which achieves
dynamic specialization with low overhead through the use of generating
extensions that create native residual code.  

One novel aspect of Fabius is its ability to achieve multiple stages of
dynamic specialization: the execution of dynamically specialized code
yields values that can be used in successive rounds of specialization.  We
demonstrate that decoupling binding times at procedure call boundaries
allows multi-stage specialization to be expressed in a two-level language.