Systematic design of program transformation frameworks by abstract interpretation

Abstract

We introduce a general uniform language-independent framework for designing online and offline source-to-source program transformations by abstract interpretation of program semantics. Iterative source-to-source program transformations are designed constructively by composition of source-to-semantics, semantics-to-transformed semantics and semantics-to-source abstractions applied to fixpoint trace semantics. The correctness of the transformations is expressed through observational and performance abstractions. The framework is illustrated on three examples: constant propagation, program specialization by online and offline partial evaluation and static program monitoring.