Parma—bridging the performance gap between imperative and logic programming

✍ Scribed by Andrew Taylor

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 677 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0743-1066
• DOI: 10.1016/s0743-1066(96)00065-9

✦ Synopsis

Parma is an experimental high-performance Prolog compiler for the MIPS RISC architecture [4]. It was the first logic programming implementation to obtain performance comparable to imperative languages. It depends heavily on a global static analysis phase based on abstract interpretation. This paper describes the important components of Parma's implementation and discusses performance results, including analysis of the incremental benefits of some components of the compiler.

<~ 1. INTRODUCTION

Parma is an experimental Prolog compiler for the MIPS architecture. Its performance exceeds previous Prolog implementations by an order of magnitude. This paper will describe the important innovations made in Parma to achieve this performance. An overview of logic programming implementation research, including Parma's place in it, can be found in Van Roy's excellent history [8]. Earlier versions of this work were presented in [11] and [12]. An extensive description of Parma can be found in [13].