arXiv subjects

Dan Ghica

Publications and source records attributed to Dan Ghica.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Closure Conversion, Flat Environments, and the Complexity of Abstract Machines

Closure conversion is a program transformation at work in compilers for functional languages to turn inner functions into global ones, by building closures pairing the transformed functions with the environment of their free variables. Abstract machines rely on similar and yet different concepts of closures and environments. In this paper, we study the relationship between the two approaches. We adopt a very simple {\lambda}-calculus with tuples as source language and study abstract machines for both the source language and the target of closure conversion. Moreover, we focus on the simple case of flat closures/environments, that is, with no sharing of environments. We provide three contributions. Firstly, a new simple proof technique for the correctness of closure conversion, inspired by abstract machines. Secondly, we show how the closure invariants of the target language allow us to design a new way of handling environments in abstract machines, not suffering the shortcomings of other styles. Thirdly, we study the machines from the point of view of time complexity, adapting analyses by Accattoli and co-authors. We show that closure conversion decreases various dynamic costs while increasing the size of the initial code. Despite these changes, the overall complexity of the machines before and after closure conversion turns out to be the same.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2023

String Diagrams for $\lambda$-calculi and Functional Computation

This tutorial gives an advanced introduction to string diagrams and graph languages for higher-order computation. The subject matter develops in a principled way, starting from the two dimensional syntax of key categorical concepts such as functors, adjunctions, and strictification, and leading up to Cartesian Closed Categories, the core mathematical model of the lambda calculus and of functional programming languages. This methodology inverts the usual approach of proceeding from syntax to a categorical interpretation, by rationally reconstructing a syntax from the categorical model. The result is a graph syntax -- more precisely, a hierarchical hypergraph syntax -- which in many ways is shown to be an improvement over the conventional linear term syntax. The rest of the tutorial focuses on applications of interest to programming languages: operational semantics, general frameworks for type inference, and complex whole-program transformations such as closure conversion and automatic differentiation.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2022

String diagrams for Strictification and Coherence

Whereas string diagrams for strict monoidal categories are well understood, and have found application in several fields of Computer Science, graphical formalisms for non-strict monoidal categories are far less studied. In this paper, we provide a presentation by generators and relations of string diagrams for non-strict monoidal categories, and show how this construction can handle applications in domains such as digital circuits and programming languages. We prove the correctness of our construction, which yields a novel proof of Mac Lane's strictness theorem. This in turn leads to an elementary graphical proof of Mac Lane's coherence theorem, and in particular allows for the inductive construction of the canonical isomorphisms in a monoidal category.

math.CT↗