Static caching for incremental computation

Yanhong A. Liu, Scott D. Stoller, and Tim Teitelbaum. Static caching for incremental computation. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 20(3):546-585, May 1998. A systematic approach is given for deriving incremental programs that exploit caching. The cache-and-prune method presented in the article consists of three stages: (I) the original program is extended to cache the results of all its intermediate subcomputations as well as the final result, (II) the extended program is incrementalized so that computation on a new input can use all intermediate results on an old input, and (III) unused results cached by the extended program and maintained by the incremental program are pruned away, leaving a pruned extended program that caches only useful intermediate results and a pruned incremental program that uses and maintains only the useful results. All three stages utilize static analyses and semantics-preserving transformations. Stages I and III are simple, clean, and fully automatable. The overall method has a kind of optimality with respect to the techniques used in Stage II. The method can be applied straightforwardly to provide a systematic approach to program improvement via caching. © ACM.

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