Output-constraint specialization

Abstract

In component-based software development, gluing of two software components are usually achieved by defining an interface specification, and creating wrappers on the components to support the interface. We believe that interface specification provides useful information for specializing components. However, an interface may define constraints on a component's inputs, as well as on its outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of program specialization with respect to output constraints. We define how an ideal specialized program should behave after such specialization, and consider a variant of partial evaluation to achieve it. In the process, we translate an output constraint into a characterization function for a component's input, and define a specializer that uses this characterization to guide the specialization process. We believe this work will broaden the scope of program specialization, and provide a framework for building more generic and versatile program adaptation techniques.