CIS PhD Student Maurer earns Intern Top Up Award from Microsoft
PhD student Luke Maurer has been awarded the Intern Top Up Award from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Professor Zena Ariola will be the recipient of the award of $10,000 for the purpose of supporting Maurer in his work on GHC as described below.
To optimize functional programs, GHC uses a time-tested intermediate language called Core, based on the simple but powerful lambda calculus. In a summer 2015 internship, we investigated the suitability of a new intermediate language based instead on the sequent calculus, which comes equipped with a precise account of control flow without requiring to name each intermediate value, as it happens in a continuation-passing style form. These added features better reflect execution costs, and thus allow better-informed optimization decisions.
We concluded that the most promising approach was not to replace Core outright, but rather to augment it with a new “join point” binding, using sequent calculus to show that our optimisations are correct.
This top-up grant will help us deliver on this promising line of attack, by implementing it in the state-of-the-art, open-source Haskell compiler GHC. We aim both to improve existing optimizations, for example, to make sure fast function calls remain fast, and to implement new algorithms that rely crucially on the information it provides, such as the "Late Lambda-Lifting pass".