Difference From Partial Evaluation
The key difference between run-time specialization and partial evaluation is that the values of on which is specialised are not known statically, so the specialization takes place at run-time.
There is also an important technical difference. Partial evaluation is applied to algorithms explicitly represented as codes in some programming language. At run-time, we do not need any concrete representation of . We only have to imagine when we program the specialization procedure. All we need is a concrete representation of the specialized version . This also means that we cannot use any universal methods for specializing algorithms, which is usually the case with partial evaluation. Instead, we have to program a specialization procedure for every particular algorithm . An important advantage of doing so is that we can use some powerful ad hoc tricks exploiting peculiarities of and the representation of and, which are beyond the reach of any universal specialization methods.
Read more about this topic: Run-time Algorithm Specialisation
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