Program Specialization

This book presents the principles and techniques of program specialization – a general method to make programs faster (and possibly smaller) when some inputs can be known in advance. As an illustration, it describes the architecture of Tempo, an offline program specializer for C that can also specialize code at runtime, and provides figures for concrete applications in various domains. Technical details address issues related to program analysis precision, value reification, incomplete program specialization, strategies to exploit specialized program, incremental specialization, and data specialization. The book, that targets both researchers and software engineers, also opens scientific and industrial perspectives.