Program adaptation via output-constraint specialization

Abstract

In component-based software development, gluing of two software components is usually achieved by defining an interface specification, and creating wrappers on components to support the interface. We believe that interface specification provides useful information for specializing components. An interface may define constraints on a component's inputs, as well as on its outputs. In this paper, we propose a new approach to program specialization with respect to output constraints. We provide the form in which an efficient specialized program should be 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.