The essence of compiling with continuations

Abstract

In order to simplify the compilation process, many compilers for higher-order languages use the continuation-passing style (CPS) transformation in a first phase to generate an intermediate representation of the source program. The salient aspect of this intermediate form is that all procedures take an argument that represents the rest of the computation (the “continuation”). Since the nai¨ve CPS transformation considerably increases the size of programs, CPS compilers perform reductions to produce a more compact intermediate representation. Although often implemented as a part of the CPS transformation, this step is conceptually a second phase. Finally, code generators for typical CPS compilers treat continuations specially in order to optimize the interpretation of continuation parameters.