rljacobson / ContinuationPassingStyle

An implementation of Compiling with Continuations by Andrew W. Appel in Rust.

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Compiling with Continuations

Compiling with Continuations by Andrew W. Appel, published by Cambridge University Press, 1992, is a classic text in the area of compiler construction. It describes the backend of the Standard ML of New Jersey compiler, which uses the continuation passing style (CPS) compilation strategy.

book.jpg

The implementation language used in the book is also ML. This repository is an alternative implementation in Rust. Effort was made to stay as close to the book as was reasonable. Because Rust is in some sense a strict superset of ML, most of the data structures translated with only minor syntactic changes. Some of the names have been changed for increased clarity.

Appel/ML vs. Me/Rust

Some notes on analogous types and data structures between this code and [Appel] are collected here.

CPS Semantics Representation

Name ML Item ML Type Rust Item Rust Type
Value Value datatype value = VAR of var LABEL of var INT of int
Values - - ValueList Vec<Value>
Continuation Continuation Expression CExp CExp

Denotation Representation

Name ML item ML type Rust item Rust type
Denotable Values dvalue list dvalue list DValueList / DenotableValueList Vec<DenotableValue>
Parameters - - Parameters, wrapper for DValueList Rc<DValueList>
Store store: (next unused, value store, integer store) loc * (loc -> dvalue) * (loc -> int) Store struct Store{ next_unused_address: Location, current_exception_handler: Location, values: DenotableValueList, integer_values: IntegerList }
Continuation dvalue FUNC dvalue list -> store -> answer RawContinuation dyn Fn(Parameters, Store) -> Answer
Continuation - - Continuation / DenotableFunction, wrapper for RawContinuation pub struct Continuation{pub f: Rc<RawContinuation>}
Answer Curried continuation: f [p1 p2 ...] (no store) store -> answer Answer pub struct Answer {f: Rc<RawContinuation>, parameters: Parameters}
Current Exception Handler Global variable val handler_ref : loc Member of Store struct Store{ current_exception_handler: Location, ... }

ContinuationExpression evaluates to Continuation (DenotableFunction) evaluates to Answer.

License and Authorship

Copyright (C) 2022 Robert Jacobson. This software is distributed under the MIT license or the Apache license at your option. See MIT.txt and APACHE.txt.

The book Compiling with Continuations by Andrew W. Appel is Copyright (C) 1992 Cambridge University Press. Quotations from this work are included herein under the "fair use" exceptions of Section 107 of the Copyright Act.

Standard ML of New Jersey is Copyright (c) 2001-2020 by The Fellowship of SML/NJ and Copyright (c) 1989-2001 by Lucent Technologies. No code from Standard ML of New Jersey was used in this project.

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An implementation of Compiling with Continuations by Andrew W. Appel in Rust.


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