Browse Theses

High-level programming languages are currently transformed into efficient low-level code using optimizations that are encoded directly into the compiler. Libraries, which are semantically rich user-level abstractions, are largely ignored by the compiler. Consequently, library writers often provide a complex, low-level interface to which programmers "manually compile" their high-level ideas. If library writers provide a high-level interface, it generally comes at the cost of performance. Ideally, library writers should provide a high-level interface and a means to compile it efficiently. This dissertation demonstrates that a compiler can be dynamically extended to support user-level abstractions. The Sausage meta-compilation system is an extensible source-to-source compiler for a subset of the Scheme programming language. Since the source language lacks nearly all the abstractions found in popular languages, new abstractions are implemented by a library and a compiler extension. In fact, Sausage implements all its general-purpose optimizations for functional languages as compiler extensions. A meta-compiler, therefore, is merely a shell that coordinates the execution of many external extensions to compile a single module. Sausage demonstrates that a compiler designed to be extended can evolve and adapt to new domains without a loss of efficiency.