Abstract
Competitive abstract machines for Prolog are usually large, intricate, and incorporate sophisticated optimizations. This makes them difficult to code, optimize, and, especially, maintain and extend. This is partly due to the fact that efficiency considerations make it necessary to use low-level languages in their implementation. Writing the abstract machine (and ancillary code) in a higher-level language can help harness this inherent complexity. In this paper we show how the semantics of basic components of an efficient virtual machine for Prolog can be described using (a variant of) Prolog which retains much of its semantics. These descriptions are then compiled to C and assembled to build a complete bytecode emulator. Thanks to the high level of the language used and its closeness to Prolog the abstract machine descriptions can be manipulated using standard Prolog compilation and optimization techniques with relative ease. We also show how, by applying program transformations selectively, we obtain abstract machine implementations whose performance can match and even exceed that of highly-tuned, hand-crafted emulators.
This work was funded in part by the Information Society Technologies program of the European Commission, Future and Emerging Technologies under the IST-15905 MOBIUS project, by the Spanish Ministry of Education under the TIN-2005-09207 MERIT project, and the Madrid Regional Government under the PROMESAS project. Manuel Hermenegildo is also supported by the Prince of Asturias Chair in Information Science and Technology at UNM.
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Morales, J.F., Carro, M., Hermenegildo, M. (2007). Towards Description and Optimization of Abstract Machines in an Extension of Prolog. In: Puebla, G. (eds) Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. LOPSTR 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4407. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71410-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71410-1_7
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