Tutorial on Online Partial Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper provides a tutorial on online partial evaluation, demonstrating how to derive a simple partial evaluator for a functional language as a variation of its interpreter, with applications in program optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to derive an online partial evaluator from an interpreter for a simple functional language, illustrating its use in program optimization.

Findings

Derived a simple online partial evaluator from an interpreter

Demonstrated the evaluator's application in program optimization

Showed the approach's suitability for model-driven development

Abstract

This paper is a short tutorial introduction to online partial evaluation. We show how to write a simple online partial evaluator for a simple, pure, first-order, functional programming language. In particular, we show that the partial evaluator can be derived as a variation on a compositionally defined interpreter. We demonstrate the use of the resulting partial evaluator for program optimization in the context of model-driven development.