Automatic Type-Driven Library Generation for Telescoping Languages

Abstract

Telescoping languages is a strategy to automatically generate highly-optimized domain-specific libraries. The key idea is to create specialized variants of library procedures through extensive offline processing. This paper describes a telescoping system, called ARGen, which generates highperformance Fortran or C libraries from prototype Matlab code for the linear algebra library, ARPACK. ARGen uses variable types to guide procedure specializations on possible calling contexts.ARGen needs to infer Matlab types in order to speculate on the possible variants of library procedures, as well as to generate code. This paper shows that our type-inference system is powerful enough to generate all the variants needed for ARPACK automatically from the Matlab development code. The ideas demonstrated here provide a basis for building a more general telescoping system for Matlab.

Library Function Selection in Compiling Octave

“…One way to address the performance problem that continues to hinder large scale application development in these languages is to compile these languages to a relatively lower-level language for which there are known good compilers [7,11,3]. Usually, the first step in this translation process is inferring types of the variables from their definitions and uses so that the individual high-level operations in the original program * The work in this paper was supported in part by the National Science could be mapped to their more precise equivalent operations.…”

“…For example, in a hypothetical high-level language, an operation such as "+" could refer to string concatenation or arithmetic addition, depending on the context. Static resolution of the operation, leading to type-based specialization, can result in impressive performance gains [3].…”

“…Other recent attempts at compiling MATLAB have largely focused on type inference and specialization, rather than efficient generation of calls to the underlying libraries [7,11,3]. However, it is worth comparing our approach with the techniques that were explored in an extension of the FALCON system at the University of Illinois [7,12].…”

“…For example, in a hypothetical high-level language, an operation such as "+" could refer to string concatenation or arithmetic addition, depending on the context. Static resolution of the operation, leading to type-based specialization, can result in impressive performance gains [3].However, these gains can be limited by the actual mapping of the high-level source operations to those available in the underlying target language. For some contexts the mapping is obvious-if the operands to a source operation are proved to be numerical scalar values there may be a simple equivalent scalar operation in the target language that can perform that operation.…”

Programming by sketching for bit-streaming programs

“…The idea is that in many scripting languages, domainspecific abstractions are provided through libraries. The telescoping language approach is to preprocess those libraries to create specialized versions of them to allow for aggressive optimization of the programs that use them without having to incur the cost of extensive interprocedural analysis at compile time [5,13].…”