Compilation and memory management for ASF plus SDF

Can formal specification techniques be scaled-up to industrial problems such as the development of domain-specific languages and the renovation of large COBOL systems? We have developed a compiler for the specification formalism ASF+SDF that has been used successfully to meet such industrial challenges. This result is achieved in two ways: the compiler performs a variety of optimizations and generates efficient C code, and the compiled code uses a run-time memory management system based on maximal subterm sharing and mark-and-sweep garbage collection. We present an overview of these techniques and evaluate their effectiveness in several benchmarks. It turns out that execution speed of compiled ASF+SDF specifications is at least as good as that of comparable systems, while memory usage is in many cases an order of magnitude smaller.