Towards DVM Friendly First-Class Functions

One of the most attractive features of functional languages is that functions are first-class. To support first-class functions many functional languages created heap-allocated closures to store the bindings of free variables. This makes it difficult to predict how the heap is accessed and makes accesses to free variables slower than accesses to bound variables at runtime. This article presents how support for first-class functions is provided in the MT Evaluator Virtual Machine without creating heap-allocated closures by using partial evaluation at runtime.