Technical report / DSIC, Technical University of Valencia, 2006.
Recent approaches to partial evaluation (a well-known technique for program specialization) include a so called size-change analysis for ensuring the termination of the process. This paper presents a novel application of size-change analysis for predicting the effectiveness of partial evaluation. Size-change analysis is based on computing an approximation of the program loops. Here, we present an automatic transformation that takes the output of the size-change analysis and produces an approximation of the loops in the specialized program. This information can be used for determining (before performing the actual specialization process) when partial evaluation may produce a significant improvement and when it would be useless. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the usefulness of our approach.
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