An ELI-to-C compiler: design, implementation, and performance

ELI is a succinct array-based interactive programming language derived from APL. In this paper we present the overall design and implementation of a bootstrapped ELI-to-C compiler which is implemented in ELI. We provide a brief introduction to the ELI language, a high-level view of the code generation strategy, and a description of our bootstrapping process. We also provide a preliminary performance evaluation. Firstly, we use three existing C benchmarks to demonstrate the performance of the ELI-generated C code as compared with interpreted ELI and native C. Secondly, we use two benchmarks originally from APL to compare the ELI-generated C to interpreted ELI and a naive hand-generated C version. These preliminary results are encouraging, showing speedups over the interpreter and in many cases performance close to C. The results also show that some future optimizations, such as copy elimination/avoidance, would be beneficial.