10,597 research outputs found
Description and Optimization of Abstract Machines in a Dialect of Prolog
In order to achieve competitive performance, abstract machines for Prolog and
related languages end up being large and intricate, and incorporate
sophisticated optimizations, both at the design and at the implementation
levels. At the same time, efficiency considerations make it necessary to use
low-level languages in their implementation. This makes them laborious to code,
optimize, and, especially, maintain and extend. Writing the abstract machine
(and ancillary code) in a higher-level language can help tame this inherent
complexity. We show how the semantics of most basic components of an efficient
virtual machine for Prolog can be described using (a variant of) Prolog. These
descriptions are then compiled to C and assembled to build a complete bytecode
emulator. Thanks to the high level of the language used and its closeness to
Prolog, the abstract machine description can be manipulated using standard
Prolog compilation and optimization techniques with relative ease. We also show
how, by applying program transformations selectively, we obtain abstract
machine implementations whose performance can match and even exceed that of
state-of-the-art, highly-tuned, hand-crafted emulators.Comment: 56 pages, 46 figures, 5 tables, To appear in Theory and Practice of
Logic Programming (TPLP
Enhanced sharing analysis techniques: a comprehensive evaluation
Sharing, an abstract domain developed by D. Jacobs and A. Langen for the analysis of logic
programs, derives useful aliasing information. It is well-known that a commonly used core
of techniques, such as the integration of Sharing with freeness and linearity information, can
significantly improve the precision of the analysis. However, a number of other proposals for
refined domain combinations have been circulating for years. One feature that is common
to these proposals is that they do not seem to have undergone a thorough experimental
evaluation even with respect to the expected precision gains.
In this paper we experimentally
evaluate: helping Sharing with the definitely ground variables found using Pos, the domain
of positive Boolean formulas; the incorporation of explicit structural information; a full
implementation of the reduced product of Sharing and Pos; the issue of reordering the
bindings in the computation of the abstract mgu; an original proposal for the addition of
a new mode recording the set of variables that are deemed to be ground or free; a refined
way of using linearity to improve the analysis; the recovery of hidden information in the
combination of Sharing with freeness information. Finally, we discuss the issue of whether
tracking compoundness allows the computation of more sharing information
Transformation-Based Bottom-Up Computation of the Well-Founded Model
We present a framework for expressing bottom-up algorithms to compute the
well-founded model of non-disjunctive logic programs. Our method is based on
the notion of conditional facts and elementary program transformations studied
by Brass and Dix for disjunctive programs. However, even if we restrict their
framework to nondisjunctive programs, their residual program can grow to
exponential size, whereas for function-free programs our program remainder is
always polynomial in the size of the extensional database (EDB).
We show that particular orderings of our transformations (we call them
strategies) correspond to well-known computational methods like the alternating
fixpoint approach, the well-founded magic sets method and the magic alternating
fixpoint procedure. However, due to the confluence of our calculi, we come up
with computations of the well-founded model that are provably better than these
methods.
In contrast to other approaches, our transformation method treats magic set
transformed programs correctly, i.e. it always computes a relevant part of the
well-founded model of the original program.Comment: 43 pages, 3 figure
Optimal Union-Find in Constraint Handling Rules
Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice rule-based language
that was originally intended for writing constraint solvers. In this paper we
show that it is also possible to write the classic union-find algorithm and
variants in CHR. The programs neither compromise in declarativeness nor
efficiency. We study the time complexity of our programs: they match the
almost-linear complexity of the best known imperative implementations. This
fact is illustrated with experimental results.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic
Programming (TPLP
Deciding Quantifier-Free Presburger Formulas Using Parameterized Solution Bounds
Given a formula in quantifier-free Presburger arithmetic, if it has a
satisfying solution, there is one whose size, measured in bits, is polynomially
bounded in the size of the formula. In this paper, we consider a special class
of quantifier-free Presburger formulas in which most linear constraints are
difference (separation) constraints, and the non-difference constraints are
sparse. This class has been observed to commonly occur in software
verification. We derive a new solution bound in terms of parameters
characterizing the sparseness of linear constraints and the number of
non-difference constraints, in addition to traditional measures of formula
size. In particular, we show that the number of bits needed per integer
variable is linear in the number of non-difference constraints and logarithmic
in the number and size of non-zero coefficients in them, but is otherwise
independent of the total number of linear constraints in the formula. The
derived bound can be used in a decision procedure based on instantiating
integer variables over a finite domain and translating the input
quantifier-free Presburger formula to an equi-satisfiable Boolean formula,
which is then checked using a Boolean satisfiability solver. In addition to our
main theoretical result, we discuss several optimizations for deriving tighter
bounds in practice. Empirical evidence indicates that our decision procedure
can greatly outperform other decision procedures.Comment: 26 page
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