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International Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming

TFP 2011: Trends in Functional Programming pp 33–48Cite as

Epic—A Library for Generating Compilers

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7193))

Abstract

Compilers for functional languages, whether strict or non-strict, typed or untyped, need to handle many of the same problems, for example thunks, lambda lifting, optimisation, garbage collection, and system interaction. Although implementation techniques are by now well understood, it remains difficult for a new functional language to exploit these techniques without either implementing a compiler from scratch, or attempting to fit the new language around another existing compiler. Epic is a compiled functional language which exposes functional compilation techniques to a language implementor, with a Haskell API. In this paper we describe Epic and outline how it may be used to implement a high level language compiler, illustrating our approach by implementing compilers for the λ-calculus and a dynamically typed graphics language.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St Andrews, KY16 9SX, Scotland/UK

    Edwin Brady

Authors
  1. Edwin Brady
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, C/ Profesor Jose Garcia Santesmases s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Ricardo Peña

  2. School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma, 110 West Boyd Street, 73019, Norman, OK, USA

    Rex Page

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Brady, E. (2012). Epic—A Library for Generating Compilers. In: Peña, R., Page, R. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7193. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32037-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32037-8_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32036-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32037-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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