Ziggy 's Descartes Page at MIT

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Descartes: A Dynamically Adaptive Scheme Compiler And Run-Time Execution Specializer

My doctoral dissertation research is on profile-driven dynamically adaptive program specialization. I have been building a prototype system which I call Descartes. The name is a corruption of the initials for Dynamically Adaptive Scheme Compiler And Run-Time Execution Specializer. Those inclined towards anthropomorphization might describe it as a self-aware compiler and run-time system.

The dissertation should be completed very soon.

Abstract and Proposal

The talk abstract from a set of progress talks I gave in April 1995 is available via FTP in raw text format. My thesis proposal is also available via FTP in postscript format, but please recognize that it is somewhat out of date with regards to the completed dissertation.

Context within the Field

This is work in the intersection of the general fields of:

Links to Related Work

It extends the growing work in to the area of partial evaluation (also called program specialization). See for example:

The FUSE Project at Stanford University (USA) [now defunct]
The COMPOSE partial evaluation group at IRISA/University of Rennes (France)
The Self Project now at Sun Microsystems Laboratory, formerly at Stanford University (USA) [Alternate mirror site also available]
The Similix Project from DIKU's TOPPS Group (Denmark)

Other recent work on partial evaluation in our lab has been done by

Andy Berlin and Rajeev Surati (with Daniel Weise) .

I have been funded most recently by the Reinventing Computing project. This project is an off-shoot of Tom Knight's Transit Project .

Miscellaneous Bits

 

ziggy@ai.mit.edu   Michael R. Blair   M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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Last modified: Thu Oct 30 15:43:46 EST 1997