2026-08-11T00:28:29Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:7273 2024-03-12T11:58:43Z ddc:004 open_access

Compiling Tree Transforms to Operate on Packed Representations Vollmer, Michael Spall, Sarah Chamith, Buddhika Sakka, Laith Koparkar, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Milind Tobin-Hochstadt, Sam Newton, Ryan R. compiler optimization program transformation tree traversal When written idiomatically in most programming languages, programs that traverse and construct trees operate over pointer-based data structures, using one heap object per-leaf and per-node. This representation is efficient for random access and shape-changing modifications, but for traversals, such as compiler passes, that process most or all of a tree in bulk, it can be inefficient. In this work we instead compile tree traversals to operate on pointer-free pre-order serializations of trees. On modern architectures such programs often run significantly faster than their pointer-based counterparts, and additionally are directly suited to storage and transmission without requiring marshaling. We present a prototype compiler, Gibbon, that compiles a small first-order, purely functional language sufficient for tree traversals. The compiler transforms this language into intermediate representation with explicit pointers into input and output buffers for packed data. The key compiler technologies include an effect system for capturing traversal behavior, combined with an algorithm to insert destination cursors. We evaluate our compiler on tree transformations over a real-world dataset of source-code syntax trees. For traversals touching the whole tree, such as maps and folds, packed data allows speedups of over 2x compared to a highly-optimized pointer-based baseline. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Michael Vollmer and Sarah Spall and Buddhika Chamith and Laith Sakka and Chaitanya Koparkar and Milind Kulkarni and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Ryan R. Newton 2017 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 74, 31st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2017) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.26 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-72737 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2017.26 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode