Relocating Machine Instructions by Currying

relocatable addresses have a cost; exposing the "label + offset" representation at code-generation time would enable extra savings. Offsets are always available at encoding time, and they could be hoisted out of closure functions. The closures would take less space, because a label occupies at most half the space of a (label, offset) pair. (The ELF object-code standard enables such space optimizations by providing for relocation entries both with and without offsets.) Exposing the representation of relocatable addresses would also make it possible to treat certain labels, like those of the ELF global offset table and procedure linkage table, as special cases. Such treatment would make it possible to shrink machine-independent object code by moving these special labels back into the s. Currying and hoisting make it possible to write efficient, machine-independent tools that relocate machine instructions. In particular, by keeping the number of distinct relocating transformations small,..