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The HERMIT in the Tree

Mechanizing Program Transformations in the GHC Core Language

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Book cover Implementation and Application of Functional Languages (IFL 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8241))

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Abstract

This paper describes our experience using the HERMIT toolkit to apply well-known transformations to the internal core language of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. HERMIT provides several mechanisms to support writing general-purpose transformations: a domain-specific language for strategic programming specialized to GHC’s core language, a library of primitive rewrites, and a shell-style–based scripting language for interactive and batch usage.

There are many program transformation techniques that have been described in the literature but have not been mechanized and made available inside GHC — either because they are too specialized to include in a general-purpose compiler, or because the developers’ interest is in theory rather than implementation. The mechanization process can often reveal pragmatic obstacles that are glossed over in pen-and-paper proofs; understanding and removing these obstacles is our concern. Using HERMIT, we implement eleven examples of three program transformations, report on our experience, and describe improvements made in the process.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For clarity of presentation we assume the function is in uncurried form, but CV is valid for functions that take any number of arguments; see [28].

  2. 2.

    Curly braces denote scoping: within a scope it is impossible to navigate above the node at which the scope starts, and when the scope ends the cursor returns to the starting node.

  3. 3.

    There is also a case-split command, which does not inline \( x \) in the alternatives.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Ed Komp for his work on implementing the HERMIT system, Jason Reich for suggesting the Mean example, and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and feedback. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1117569.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

    Neil Sculthorpe, Andrew Farmer & Andy Gill

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  1. Neil Sculthorpe
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  2. Andrew Farmer
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  3. Andy Gill
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Correspondence to Neil Sculthorpe .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Ralf Hinze

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Sculthorpe, N., Farmer, A., Gill, A. (2013). The HERMIT in the Tree. In: Hinze, R. (eds) Implementation and Application of Functional Languages. IFL 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8241. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41582-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41582-1_6

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