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sampsyo / cs6120

advanced compilers
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6120/2023fa/
MIT License
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Project Proposal: Higher-order functions in Bril! #221

Closed priyasrikumar closed 3 years ago

priyasrikumar commented 3 years ago

What will you do? We will explore higher-order functions (HOFs) in Bril by implementing a lambda lifter and a defunctionalizer. Our HOFs are designed to be arbitrarily higher order, meaning that they can take functions as arguments. We will also need to extend the Bril syntax to support local function definitions. A stretch goal is to get programs to return functions themselves.

How will you do it? We will start by implementing lambda lifting. Additionally, we will need to add closures to Bril, as well as implement typechecking for HOFs.

How will you empirically measure success? We will run our lambda lifter on the Bril benchmarks and measure the performance of the HOF versions against the benchmarks. We will also write some new programs using HOFs and defunctionalize them, producing new source code we can then compare to the programs we wrote.

Team members: Me and @goki0607!

sampsyo commented 3 years ago

Sounds good! Sooner rather than later, I'd like to see the (abstract) syntax you're proposing for higher-order functions. Seems a little tricky to fit into the existing instruction-based representation and may require creativity. Getting this right first before you get too deep into the transformation would be good.