Deriving Compilers and Virtual Machines for a Multi-level Language

We develop virtual machines and compilers for a multi-level language, which supports multi-stage specialization by composing program fragments with quotation mechanisms. We consider two styles of virtual machines—ones equipped with special instructions for code generation and ones without—and show that the latter kind can deal with, more easily, low-level code generation, which avoids the overhead of (runtime) compilation by manipulating instruction sequences, rather than source-level terms, as data. The virtual machines and accompanying compilers are derived by program transformation, which extends Ager et al.’s derivation of virtual machines from evaluators.