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On the Performance of Bytecode Interpreters in Prolog

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Functional and Constraint Logic Programming (WFLP 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12560))

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Abstract

The semantics and the recursive execution model of Prolog make it very natural to express language interpreters in form of AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) interpreters where the execution follows the tree representation of a program. An alternative implementation technique is that of bytecode interpreters. These interpreters transform the program into a compact and linear representation before evaluating it and are generally considered to be faster and to make better use of resources.

In this paper, we discuss different ways to express the control flow of interpreters in Prolog and present several implementations of AST and bytecode interpreters. On a simple language designed for this purpose, we evaluate whether techniques best known from imperative languages are applicable in Prolog and how well they perform. Our ultimate goal is to assess which interpreter design in Prolog is the most efficient as we intend to apply these results to a more complex language. However, we believe the analysis in this paper to be of more general interest.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Acol is not a backronym for Acol is a computable language.

  2. 2.

    While, again, interoperability with C allows embedding of such data structures, standard library predicates usually only offer logarithmic access.

  3. 3.

    A fair comparison is not possible since the C interpreter does not support unbounded integer values.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Philipp Körner, David Schneider & Michael Leuschel

Authors
  1. Philipp Körner
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  2. David Schneider
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  3. Michael Leuschel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Philipp Körner .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

    Michael Hanus

  2. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Claudio Sacerdoti Coen

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Körner, P., Schneider, D., Leuschel, M. (2021). On the Performance of Bytecode Interpreters in Prolog. In: Hanus, M., Sacerdoti Coen, C. (eds) Functional and Constraint Logic Programming. WFLP 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12560. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75333-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75333-7_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-75332-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-75333-7

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