Partial evaluation vs flow-graph analysis

Hi gurus,


Partial evaluation seems to be a hot topic in the compiler field
nowaday. As far as we've understood, the basic idea is to partially
evaluate (sic) a program based on the information we are able to
gather about its arguments. This requires some sort of intrepreter
(or is it a meta-interpreter?) to compute the simplified program.


Did we miss something obvious so far?


This makes us think that the kind of tasks well suited for partial
evaluation can also be done, for most of them, with "older" techniques
such as flow-graph equations.


So our question is what kind of optimisations will partial evaluation
make possible that are out of reach of a classical optimizer (and
vice-versa)?


Is there some paper comparing the two techniques?


Also, most of the papers talk about PE in the context of functional
languages like ML or Haskell. Is this technique also usefull/usable
for imperative languages like C, C++, Java or Eiffel?


Thanks in advance for your help,


Christian Fabre & Francois de Ferriere.


=====
                  Christian Fabre (TOG-RI was OSF-RI)
The Open Group Research Institute Net: c.fabre@opengroup.org
              2 avenue de Vignate Tel: +33 4 76.63.48.90
            38610 Gieres - France Fax: +33 4 76.51.05.32
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